


Aleatory

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Background Relationships, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Sad with a Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-15
Updated: 2014-11-15
Packaged: 2018-02-25 12:10:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2621198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Great," Jem mutters in an undertone. "First I was that freak with the bum eye and the queer brother who offed himself, now I'm that freak who thinks she can talk to her brother's ghost."</p><p>"You're not a freak," says Lisa immediately, in a tone that means, <i>you kind of are, but I'm going to roll with it.</i> [AU].</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aleatory

**Author's Note:**

> For [against-stars](http://archiveofourown.org/users/against_stars). By this point, we have each other so well trained that any time we come over and say, "hey, want to hear about this AU?" the other's response is immediately "DO IT DO THE THING".
> 
> So here's the AU where there are ghosts instead of zombies.
> 
>  **Warnings** for off-screen suicide and mentions of self-harm, minor violence and two instances of nonsexual physical assault. A **lot** of grieving. I wouldn't say it's any more or less heavy than the actual show, but keep in mind there some parts of this might come a bit too close.

*

 

Jemima Walker drove her parents home from the clinic, the night her brother died.

She was two months shy of her sixteenth birthday, and the most driving she’d ever done up to that point was the time Rick Macy let her take his frightening, over-large, all-terrain vehicle in circles around the empty Roarton Valley School carpark. She did it pathetically slowly, foot leaden on the brake, and Kieren sat in the back where she could just see him in her peripheral, gripping the door handle and hissing theatrically every time she popped the kerb like she was trying to take them off-roading in Bowland.

She couldn’t remember why she was with them -- had invited herself along, probably, out of stubbornness and a particular teenage refusal to let her brother have any fun without her, and upon realizing that older boys weren’t any more interesting than the tenth year girls she _wasn’t_ hanging out with, refused to quit and go home, also out of stubbornness.

It was Rick’s idea, the, “oi, Ren, is your sister going to learn how to drive before you, then?” and before she knew it, they’d all swapped places like it was a Chinese fire drill, Rick usurping Kieren out of the brotherly position in the passenger seat and Kieren taking her spot in the back, Jem adjusting the seat as close to the pedals as possible and ignoring her brother, who was buckling himself in and muttering the Lord’s Prayer in a way that was clearly meant to take the piss.

Rick Macy grinned a lot and said “all right?” and made her indicate every go around.

“Gotta make it muscle memory, Jazz,” he told her, and when she froze for the fourth time, “Up indicates right, down indicates left, there you go --“

And Kieren made a horrible noise as the nave plate scraped the kerb and she yelled, “ _Jesus fucking Christ,_ Kier!” and Rick laughed in a particularly bright, untouchable way that Jem was forever going to associate with him.

(She could never quite recreate it in her head, after.)

When it was time to go, that day, Jem’s mum handed her the keys and said, “-- would you?”

Jem stared at the keyring as if it was as incomprehensible as the drug labels on the PSA chart behind Sue Walker’s head. They were keys, a bottle opener, a tiny Tiki mask her parents had gotten on their second honeymoon, the paint on its nose weathered away.

“I don’t have a license, mum,” she tried.

“Jem, _please.”_

So Jem followed her parents out into the carpark, which was pitch-black and empty, the GP having gone home as soon as he realized there wasn’t anything to be done, leaving the Walkers with the clerk. (They never show stuff like this on TV, she thinks, the little things you have to do -- answer questions for the paperwork, get up, get back to the car, drive home with this _space_ between everybody. The distance between the house and the clinic didn’t magically become nonexistent just because Jem couldn’t handle it, just because Jem didn’t want to get home and look at Kieren’s shoes in their cubby and think, _he is never coming back for those.)_

She adjusted the seat and the mirrors while Mum deposited Dad, grey and mute, in the back. She slid in next to him, and met Jem’s eyes in the rearview.

Mum had put Dad in a coat earlier; fetched it out of the boot and draped over him out of self-preservation. With him seated, though, it bulged open, revealing the patches of blood on his jacket he hadn’t been able to mop off in the clinic. She could see it staining his cuffs, too.

Not once in her entire life had Jem seen that kind of blood on somebody.

Her eyes snapped front again.

“We’ll --“ said Mum. “Tomorrow, we’ll -- call some people, and …”

Her voice got fainter before fading out entirely, and her gaze tracked around the car like she was trying to find it again. Dad didn’t acknowledge either of them. He was shivering. He kept looking at his hands.

She drove her parents home, slowly and without incident, and indicated every turn she made.

 

*

 

November, for the Walkers, is much like what September must be to that guy from Green Day.

The closer it gets to the 30th, the more Jem wishes she could crawl underneath her blankets and wake up when the calendar ticked over to December 1, like somehow she could avoid the dark, unpleasant suck that was coming simply by sleeping through it.

Things couldn’t get worse, surely, if she wasn’t awake.

Outside, the weather does its best to mimic her, or she’s doing her best to mimic the weather, or something: the chill in the air stops being pleasantly autumnal and starts being frigid, and the leaves briskly finish dropping from the trees to plaster together in the gutters. Everybody tracks them into school, muddy paths spiking out across the lino, and she finds herself peeling them off the heels of her boots without any particular kind of malice.

The break, when it happens, comes at the middle of the month, in between Jem’s exams.

It starts with Mum at the breakfast table, saying to her husband in the same light way you’d address someone at the post office when you’re about to be a bother, “I was thinking, since I’ve got break coming up soon, that I’d pick up some boxes, and we could start moving things into storage? Or charity --”

Jem catches onto her meaning first, and moves. “ _No._ Absolutely --“

“-- with the holidays coming up, now might be a good time to donate some of --“

“ _\-- fucking_ not!”

The outburst makes Dad blink owlishly, and he peers at them like they’re curious specimens under glass.

“What things?”

“ _Kieren’s_ things!” Jem cries, and Dad lances a look at Mum, clean and cold and true and utterly wordless. “She wants to give Kieren’s things away!”

Mum’s face pinches together, mouth working thinly like she’s trying to get the residue of her own words off her teeth, swallow them back.

With sharp, economical movements, Jem picks up her plate and her glass and slams past them into the kitchen. Dropping the dishes into the sink, she storms straight on through to the stairs, making sure to crash into every door on the way.

She’s already shouting when she gets to the landing.

“Kieren! Kier, _quick,_ come help me pick what you need. Mum’s going to --“

She shoves through into her brother’s room, and the change is so sudden that it hits her like frost in her lungs. And sure, the temperature’s colder in here, but it’s more the shock of moving from an inhabited space to an uninhabited one that freezes her.

Her inhale scrapes painfully inside her chest. She gets her words out around it.

“-- she’s gone mental, she’s going to start giving things away. You’ve got to help me pick what you want to save.”

She turns first to the closet, which at least is familiar territory. She’s the same size her brother was, if not his height, and his nicest trousers and most comfortable tops have steadily been merging into her wardrobe since the first time she broke the seal on her dead brother’s door, five days before Christmas. She wasn’t sure what her plan had been, then -- she just remembers being angry, the kind that tightened her gut up into cold little knots, and it had been darkly, viscerally satisfying, opening the door neither of her parents seemed to think existed anymore.

Kieren had worn this pair of goth trousers with flared legs and a million buckles at least twice a week, back around the time Bill Macy banned him from the Macy house, when they suddenly had Rick at their supper table a lot more often than they used to. They were very MCR, those trousers, and Kieren wore them with his Birthday Massacre shirts and a dozen jelly bracelets. He looked untouchable, and Jem coveted every inch of that ensemble in that all-consuming, heartbroken kind of way that girls want things at age thirteen.

Mum barely tolerated it on Kieren -- when Jem hinted that she wouldn’t mind something similar, it’d earned her the kind of look you’d reserve for roadkill.

So it was those trousers Jem took, the first time.

“Kier?”

The quiet in the room is getting to her. The clock above Rick’s portrait is stopped -- she doesn’t know if that’s Kieren’s doing, or if the battery simply ran out -- and she’s not used to her brother’s room without something in it, moving or making noise. She doesn’t like being in here when it feels like an exhibit, like she shouldn’t be touching. “Kier, are you listening to me?”

The blinds slap open. Sunlight slashes at the carpet, the bedspread, Jem’s face.

They slap shut.

“Good!” Urgency sets her moving, like Mum’s coming up the stairs _right now_ with those boxes, instead of where she probably is, which is still at the table, deliberately not saying anything to Dad. “We’ll stash it in my room -- nobody can find anything in there anyway, it’ll be safe. If you want it, move it or something and I’ll nick it.”

 

*

 

Days later, when she comes down the stairs, Mum pokes her head out of the kitchen and says, “there you are! What do you want for breakfast, Jemima, love?”

“Don’t care,” Jem answers, dropping down into her chair and burrowing her head into her arms to wait.

A few minutes later, a plate lands in front of her. She raises her head: it’s toast and beans and two pieces of bacon, which isn’t really what she wanted, but she refrains from making a face at it and pulls herself upright.

Her mother sits down and says, “Jem …”

Jem immediately puts her fork down.

She knows this ritual -- this is when Mum tries to Talk. She has to do it while Jem’s here, trapped at the table, and before Dad comes downstairs, because Dad will cut through any conversation about Kieren with all the dangerous pleasantness of a freshly-sharpened knife, and he won’t stop talking about petrol prices or what Clive Furness is doing with his hedges until it’s time to go.

She braces herself. It’s like a lock clicking shut between her shoulder blades, and below that, each notch in her spine tenses up.

“Jem,” tries Mum, helplessly, watching Jem’s armor go up link-by-link. “I’ve noticed that you’ve been taking things out of … out of Kieren’s room.”

Slowly, Jem leans back, away from her mother.

She’s suddenly glad for the ensemble she thought to put together this morning: black jacket, red skirt with the pleats. Each pleat is festooned in safety pins, forming a solid coat: she makes a fantastic amount of noise every time she moves. She’s got the leggings with the aesthetic rips in them underneath -- Lisa helped her make them, because Lisa approves of anything that makes Jem Walker look like she’s about five minutes away from killing a man.

She folds her arms.

Her mum looks at the table. “I’m sorry about the other night, I shouldn’t have brought it up like that. I thought maybe it would be something we could do together, you know, as a healing thing --“

Jem bolts upright. “You’re not still thinking of doing it!”

Mum flings a hand out towards her, like Jem’s already on her feet and abandoning her breakfast. “Jem, _please --“_

“You can’t! It’s bullshit, you can’t -- just, what, have us all just happily box up Kieren’s things to give away to people? Like they’re going to appreciate it. What’s the rush --“ she works her mouth, balling her words up so she can spit them down onto the table between their dishes, “-- do you need a sewing room, Mum? Is that it?”

“Jem …”

“We’re _not_ touching Kieren’s things. We’re not. He’s going to --“

She falters.

Mum looks at her. “Going to what? What’s he going to do with them, Jem?”

It is, in fact, a stunningly cruel thing to say, and Jem can see it tightening in her mother’s face, just how much she hates herself for saying it.

And this is why Jem wants to be woken up when November ends: there’s nowhere to go but through it, the feeling rising and yawning open inside Jem’s stomach, awful and ugly and dark. It’s a chasm rupturing through her, pulping her insides and cracking her sternum into two neat pieces, and Jem’s too breathlessly staggered to even cry.

Kieren doesn’t care what happens to his things.

If Kieren cared what happened to his things, he wouldn’t have killed himself. If Kieren cared that _they_ were going to have to go through his things, he _wouldn’t have killed himself._

If Kieren cared _at all --_

Even as he is, in his current state, he can’t use his things. He’s not going to need them.

She sits down with a colossal clatter of her safety pins.

Her mother sighs. “What made you pick those things, Jemima?”

From her brother’s room, Jem took all of the ticket stubs that matched her own, she took down flyers for secret shows up at Lambert farm that looked incomprehensible at first glance -- a unicorn lying down, a crystal-studded skull, but were, in fact, messages about times and places for people who knew what to look for. She took an envelope from the desk that was full of Kieren’s getaway money (“please don’t touch that, Jem,” he’d said to her years ago, when she’d threatened to take all his money because she knew where he kept it, “it’s in case Rick and I have to --“ and he never finished that sentence, but he didn’t need to, and anyway, they don’t need this money anymore, do they.) She took a painting of herself, and one of Kieren.

They weren’t, Jem only realizes in this moment, the kind of things Kieren pointed out to her because _he_ needed them. He picked them because _she_ needed them.

Arguably, the only thing he picked selfishly was the shoebox from under the bed. And maybe not even then; she hasn’t been brave enough to open it yet.

She swallows. And swallows again, her throat clicking dryly over an arid patch.

She meets her mother’s eyes. Sue Walker must know what she’s going to say before she says it; her mouth’s already turning down, disappointed, as Jem insists, “Kieren asked me to keep them.”

 

*

 

Lisa volunteers to come with her.

“Lisa, it’s therapy. They’re fucking sending me to therapy.”

“Nah, look,” Lisa extends her phone, and then, because she is a good friend, she also offers the open end of her Jaffa cakes. Jem takes one morosely, and another, because the Jaffas make a compelling argument. “Under parish activities. It’s an open bereavement circle.”

“Are you kidding?” She snatches the phone, dragging at the screen to get the text to enlarge. “They can’t even be bothered to make me a proper appointment with an actual therapist?”

“They probably didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“Lisa, they think I’m barmy as a box of cats. I’m not going to be _less_ uncomfortable if they make me sit down with a bunch of strangers, talking about our feelings. Can I have another -- ta.”

“So take me with you,” Lisa’s tone stays matter-of-fact.

Jem scrapes a dry look off of her, and asks around her mouthful of Jaffa, “Why? Do you need therapy?”

“Sure.”

This trips her as surely as if Lisa had flung it at her feet. She blinks, hop-skips mentally, and looks over. Lisa returns her look steadily, mouth skewing to the side.

“I had to borrow a black dress off Charlotte Briggs for the funeral, Jem, and do you know how tragically short she is?” A beat passes, and her gaze drops. “I think you should go, yeah? Because if _I_ feel like this -- and I’ve always been an only child -- then I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”

“Lisa …”

Jem’s eyes flick first towards the blinds, then up and around across the masks (“it’s a metaphor, see?” her dad had said brightly, after going ahead and installing the first shelf of them. “Pick any one of the masks to wear on your way out the door today! You know? You know? Metaphor! What do you think?” And Jem exchanged a look with Kieren over the back of the sofa. He smirked back at her and said, “they’re very handsome dust-collectors, Dad,” and Dad’s arms dropped incredulously. Kieren passed him before he recovered, and he called at Kieren’s back, “I thought out of anybody, you’d have more appreciation for art, son!”) but there’s no movement. She reaches over, picking up her iPod and checking the screen. It’s blank.

Lisa tracks the movement, and throws up her hands. “ _Nuh-_ uh, I’m not listening to any of your Screaming is Art today, thanks. Can’t you just give me a hug like a normal person?”

Jem does, wrapping her arms all the way around Lisa’s lanky body and giving her a proper squeeze.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re welcome. Here, put this in your gob and stop looking at me like that.”

 

*

 

Because it’s just Jem’s luck, she recognizes everybody in the bereavement circle.

It’s lead by Shirley Wilson, who just finished her counseling certification (“I took the three-week course, yeah,” Jem overhears her saying to Mrs Lonsdale, and, “I _know,_ that’s a long time, innit?”) and sets them up in the room where the kids have Sunday school.

There’s scones, and tea in paper cups. Jem helps herself liberally to both. If she has her hands full, it gives her the excuse not to look anyone in the eyes.

It doesn’t work.

Dean Halton positions himself right in front of her, mechanically chewing on a bite of scone in the same way she imagines goats do, his mouth open. He peels one finger up in order to point at her.

“You’re Jem Walker,” and his small, sunken teeth make an appearance. “En’t you the one who sat on that Karen chick and sawed off her hair with a knife?”

They’d been scissors, actually, and it had taken a surprising amount of effort. It movies, it always comes off in one clean blow, but Jem really had to put her elbow into it, chomping down several times before Karen’s ponytail came away in her hands.

“Yeah, I did,” she says. “Better hold on to yours, then,” just for the satisfaction of watching Dean clutch protectively at his tiny little rat’s tail.

Charlotte Briggs is there, too, auburn hair coifed over her forehead, and Jem studies her for a moment before muttering out of the corner of her mouth, “What do you mean, tragically short? She’s not any shorter than I am.”

“You see my point,” Lisa deadpans back, and, “ow!” when Jem smacks her arm.

There’s Nina, sitting by herself and not meeting anybody’s eyes, and Vickie Burns who used to be Rick Macy’s girlfriend and is now engaged to some bloke named Gary who coaches trapshooting and does a lot of posturing (her words, not Jem’s, which really makes Jem wonder _why_ she’s marrying him.) Irving Kelly sits to her right, even though the notice on the parish webpage said “age twenty and under only”.

“Right,” says Shirley, glancing around at them all. “Thank you all for coming.”

“Didn’t have a choice, did we?” Vickie pops her gum. “Everybody’s mum knows everybody else’s mum, and they all made us show up, didn’t they?”

“Right,” says Shirley again. “I’ll take your lead, then, Vickie. How about we all go around and introduce ourselves and say why we think we’re here.”

Jem sinks lower in her seat, turning her paper cup around in her hands.

She’s in Kieren’s goth trousers with all the loops and straps. They’re too long, the seams coming undone at the bottom from being walked on all the time. She’d lost inspiration about half-way through putting the rest of the outfit together, so she’s also got one of his flannels pulled over her jumper. She’s not feeling very hardcore at all, but when they get to her, she knows immediately that Dean Halton’s story about Karen’s hair has made its rounds, and just like that, she’s infuriated.

She gets no warning. She’s there, and the next second, so’s this white-out fury.

“I’m Jem Walker,” she says around the static in her ears. “And I’m here because my brother’s ghost lives in our walls and sometimes at night he tells me to do things.”

Silence doesn’t so much fall as _lands_ with a terrific amount of gore.

Beside her, Lisa shifts her weight, shading her face with her hand in an embarrassed way.

Before Shirley Wilson can recover, Dean leans forward.

“What does he tell you to do?” he asks eagerly.

“Ugh,” and now, Jem rolls her eyes. “The stupidest stuff. He wants me to make sure I’m taking care of myself, because I’m,” up go the air quotes, “‘going through a grieving period’ and it’s important to take time to look out for myself. He tells me my feelings are valid, even the negative ones, and I don’t have to do anything with them except feel them. He tells me not to rise to people looking to pick fights. Like, for a ghost he’s really fucking demanding.”

 

*

 

_”I am, I am --“_

_”-- not --“_

“You are too! Remember that time you spent, like, twenty minutes flipping the pillowcase into my face because you thought I had school? It was a _Sunday,_ Kier.”

“ _\-- don’t regret a single --“_

“ _\-- ain’t goin’ let me live it down, babe --“_

“Damn right, I’m not. If your superiors come along and sit me down and are like, ‘all right, let’s do a performance review, how well did your ghost do in his haunting?’ I’m not going to take the piss. I’m gonna tell them, he’s right terrible at it.”

“ _Hey, hey, hey --“_

She mimes peering down at a clipboard, pen poised. “All he does all day is shake the blinds and sometimes he even makes the lights flicker, but since I can’t take him to school to frighten people there’s no point in that, is there. Can’t even rattle chains. Complete bollocks at giving nightmares.” She puts the pen down and looks around. “ _Can_ you make the walls bleed? Don’t think we’ve ever tested that one.”

She glances back down at the clipboard, but all there is, of course, is her own two hands. She balls them into fists.

“But,” she continues, speaking to the rug at her feet. “You should let me keep him anyway, because sometimes he’ll put the kettle on before I’m even awake, and one time he knocked my water all over my schoolwork because I was doing the wrong maths assignment. And he’s my brother, steaming heap of ectoplasm or not, so.”

The music scratches. It skips. A guitar wails briefly, crashing drums choke off mid-beat, some male vocal starts to croon something and then decides against it.

She looks over and sees song titles flashing across the front of her iPod like ticker tape, as Kieren struggles to find something to express.

“Don’t mug yourself,” she says gently.

A pause.

Then “For Whom the Bell Tolls” starts, as gentle as a nudge in the arm, and Jem smiles, swinging her legs over to the other side of the bed and shoving yesterday’s outfit out of the way so she can pick her book up off the floor.

“And anyway,” she says, arranging her pillows. “I haven’t even told you the best part. Remember Vickie Burns?”

She glances up, cautiously.

The blinks flick once.

“Right,” Jem says, easier, not sure what she’d been expecting. Kieren’s jealousy had always been more of a small pocket-sized mouse he carried around, rather than some awful, slimy, constricting snake of a thing, even at that age where jealousy swallows everything for no good reason. Jem’s pretty sure Vickie had been a lot more jealous of Kieren than Kieren was of her.

She wouldn’t know what that’s like, to be that secure in your position in somebody’s life. She _thought_ she did, but --

“Right, well, she started dating Gary Kendal -- I don’t know him, I think he was in Rick’s year, yeah? -- and they’re getting married in the spring. She was there, but get this, so was Gary’s mate and the only reason _he_ was there was to spend time with her.”

The slats on the blinds flap again.

“ _Right!”_ says Jem for the third time. “Dean Halton’s trying to take his best mate’s girl.”

Metallica skips over into the opening of something Soulfly; a maniacal cackle sounds out, a pounding “ha ha ha” accompanied by drums.

“I know. I didn’t think anybody in Boreton had it in them, either.”

The knock on her door makes her leap.

“Jem?” Her mother sticks her head in without waiting for Jem’s okay.

The iHome goes dark and the blinds shiver shut. Mum darts a look at them, brow puckering: they sway faintly against the window and Jem’s on the other side of the room.

“Who are you talking to?”

“No one, Mum, _get out.”_

Mum brushes her hair out of her face, and it separates into unwashed clumps. Her jumper’s the same one she had on yesterday, and Jem sees these things without applying much thought to them.

“I just wanted to check in, see how the meeting went?”

“It went awful, okay, how did you fucking think it would go? Now _get. Out.”_

“Jem --“

Hair-trigger Jem. She explodes to her feet, book upending back onto the messy rug. “ _OUT!”_ tears from her throat. “You don’t get to come in here, get out _GET OUT.”_ Mum steps back smartly into the hallway, letting Jem get a grip on her door handle.

Before she slams it, she says, “Your daughter’s the fucking loon who talks to dead people and now everybody knows it, are you happy?”

 

*

 

The ghost of Jem Walker’s brother first started haunting her on a Thursday, as she was palming a Swiss army knife to take to school, thinking of how satisfying it would be to put it underneath Hilary Sorensen’s throat.

Hilary and Karen and them sensed weakness the same way certain bloodsucking insects sensed human flesh from miles away, and Jem became a target because Jem’s control on her emotions was nonexistent. She was a big red button that they loved pushing for the instant gratification of seeing something happen.

Jem just wanted them to leave her alone.

She picked up the Swiss army knife and flicked the blade open, turning it over.

Mum and Dad had gotten Jem and Kieren each one for their birthdays one year, and even let them customize the handle. Jem decked hers out in black and purple roses, which printed kind of pixely, but still looked okay, and Kieren hadn’t wanted anything on his, so he wound up with a plain red one and Jem called him a bore for two weeks. Seriously -- talk about wasted opportunities!

(She doesn’t know what happened to that knife. She didn’t see it in his room. Maybe it’s in the shed?)

She turned to the mirror and did it again: open, shut, just to see if she looked appropriately intimidating as she did it.

She did. The Jem in the mirror looked a right fucking scare, with black-rimmed eyes and hair as red as a double-decker and an expression like murder. She smiled.

And behind her, the tie holding the blinds up snapped open, and they came clattering down with a terrific noise.

Jem shrieked and jumped, knife tumbling from her hand, and as she bent down to retrieve it, the nest she used for her earrings popped off its hook, spilling jewelry everywhere. It was on the same wall as the window, so the blinds coming down must have shaken it loose.

“Fucking shit,” she complained, because she didn’t have the time to pick all that up. She put the knife down on the bedside table and settled for putting the nest back on its hook.

She glanced at the jumble of earrings on the rug and said, “no,” and left them there, her mood considerably fouled.

It was only when she got to school and saw Hilary’s plump, red lip lift off her teeth in a sneer that she realized she’d forgotten the Swiss Army knife at home.

Later, sitting in the headmaster’s office, she admitted to herself that was probably a blessing.

What would she have allowed herself to do, if she had access to that weapon?

As it stood, a girl like Jem Walker punching a girl like Hilary Sorensen was unremarkable -- which, really, was unfair to both Jem and Hilary, because it felt pretty remarkable to them -- and they got off with a trip to the nurse’s office to get ice.

She looked for the Swiss Army knife when she got home, but couldn’t find it, and assumed she must have put it down somewhere when the earring nest fell.

 

*

 

The episode with Karen’s hair and the scissors came later.

Karen, and Hilary, and Charlotte, and their handful of not-quite-friends who weren’t actively antagonistic but weren’t below a snicker at Jem’s expense either, grew out of taunting her about her sad dead wrist-cutting brother after the first four months or so.

Not because they’d suddenly become champions of empathy, she’s sure, but because they already had Jem trained to come at them with fists swinging simply by opening their mouths.

Without needing to be clever about it, their taunts were insultingly juvenile: they mimicked anything Jem said in a deliberately dumb tone, they made loud comments about her ratty red hair and her heavy eye, and Jem, already wound up as soon as they came into range, blew up.

But that time, she’d been standing with Lisa, cutting out brochures and passing them to Lisa to fold.

“You still got a shot at Level 2s, though,” she was saying. The brochures were for the eleventh years about to take the GSCEs. “I’ve missed too much, I’m probably going to get nothing but Ds and Gs.”

“That’s not true,” Lisa returned, gentle.

Jem shrugged. “You think you’ll get any A-stars?”

“We’ll see,” Lisa had said, in a way that meant _yes._ “Don’t count yourself out, mate. You know more than you think you do, you might surprise yourself!”

“Yeah,” and that was Karen’s voice. “And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter, it’s not like somebody killed themselves because they’d rather be dead than see how you turned out. Oh!” she popped her head to one side, finger at her lips. “ _Wait.”_

A beat.

“What the fuck,” said Lisa flatly, and then Jem detonated.

It was like a mushroom cloud had obliterated the inside of her skull, and she moved. She gathered up her stack of papers, and swung.

Karen’s hands came up in time to block the blow, but paper exploded everywhere and she took a surprised step backward. Her heel caught on the leg of the table behind her, just in time for Jem to give her a shove.

She sprawled, startled and squealing, and Jem snatched up the closest sharp article (scissors, “MAIN OFFICE” Sharpied onto the handle; they were not in the main office) and pounced, straddling her back.

Without a single thought in her head, her vision turned white and fuzzy at the edges and her heart overlarge and _pounding,_ Jem grabbed at whatever presented itself to her. She wrapped Karen’s ponytail around one wrist and started sawing.

“ _Jem!”_

Lisa leapt into the fray, hands plucking at the shoulders of Jem’s blazer, but in four good, hard twists of her elbow, the damage was done.

Jem sat back, Karen’s hair a loose streamer in her hand, Karen twisting and writhing between her knees and _screaming_ bloody murder, and Charlotte Briggs stood in the doorway.

“You _bitch!”_ screeched out of Karen. “You fucking _psycho bitch!”_

Unconcerned, Jem rose, looked at the hair, and dropped it.

Karen’s eyes landed on it, and she propped herself up on an elbow, her free hand darting to her head to feel the sawn-off ends. Her mouth yawned open, too horrified to even make a sound.

Jem thought of a number of things she could say. _Fuck you_ was top of the list, directly above, _now you know what it’s like, to lose something so preciously close to you without warning._

But all she said was, “Lisa, I’m going to the headmaster’s office.”

“I’m coming with you,” Lisa said instantly, because Jem was definitely going to need a witness if she had a single prayer of not getting expelled.

They stepped over the body on the floor and headed for the door, and behind them, Karen wailed at Charlotte, “Why didn’t you _stop_ her?”

And Jem didn’t yet know about Charlotte’s dad, about her mum who hadn’t gotten out of bed for six months. She wouldn’t know about that until the bereavement circle, months from now, so it was a surprise, the way Charlotte looked down and said quietly, “I don’t know, mate, I think you deserved that one.”

 

*

 

Vickie Burns lies crossways on the bed, leopard-print pumps dangling above the rug, and Charlotte sits with her legs folded next to her, looking around Jem’s cluttered room with the open curiosity of someone inspecting a subterranean cavern.

Jem moves a pile of folded laundry off her chair, the cushion of which she hasn’t seen in probably over a year. She dumps the clothes on the floor and sits down. Godsmack plays faintly from the iHome. She smirks over at it; she hadn’t turned it on.

“Are there rules about it?” Vickie asks the ceiling. “Like, do you need to summon ghosts?”

Jem thinks about it. “No?” she ventures. “Like, Kier’s pretty good at announcing himself when he arrives and about saying good-bye when he leaves, and he usually hears me if I call. I don’t know where he goes when he’s not here, but when he _is_ here, he can’t leave the property. Like he can’t follow me to school or nothing. Right?” she asks.

The blinds slap open, then shut again.

Vickie and Charlotte’s heads whip around, and in unison, they look back to Jem, who holds up her hands to show she isn’t controlling it.

“Once means ‘yes,’ twice means ‘no,’” she explains.

“Oh my god,” says Charlotte faintly.

Vickie remains more skeptical. “It can’t be that easy,” she says. “Or we’d have spirits haunting us everywhere. We’d never get rid of them. What’s so special about you?”

“Does everybody become a ghost?” Charlotte cuts in, a peculiar note in her voice.

Sunlight slashes through the room once, then twice.

Charlotte’s shoulders cave inward.

“Are there others? Can you talk to them?” Vickie pushes herself up onto her elbows. “Like, can you ask if somebody else’s ghost is here in Roarton?”

The blinds open, and hesitate. They flick three times in rapid succession.

“Yes and no,” Jem translates before they can ask. “I definitely think there’s a community, or whatever,” hence all the jokes about reporting Kieren to his superiors for subpar haunting. “But it’s not …” she trails off, and waits until Charlotte looks over before telling her, softly, “If your dad’s still hanging about, then he’s the only one who can tell you that.”

Jem had checked on that, once she was convinced the spirit communicating with her was really her brother. She’d thought of a dozen different ways to ask, before she just came out with it:

Did he and Rick get to be together, at least, in the afterlife?

(It’d seemed really important to know. It would only be fair, right?)

It had taken Kieren a while to find the words to explain, and for Jem to guess at the right translation.

No, but also yes. Together, to the dead, didn’t mean the same thing it did to the living.

 _Are you still sad?_ Jem had asked, raw, and there’d been a long pause before her iPod shuffled and the words “I Miss You” came up on the screen, at which point Jem shut it off and pulled her covers up over her head so she could have a cry and do anything but think about her brother, who was here without being here.

“How do you know?” Vickie again. “How do you know if one’s around?”

“Little things,” Jem replies, and the blinds flap in agreement. “Kieren?”

The lights plunge. Charlotte makes a high, startled sound; Jem hasn’t ever been in the Briggs’ house, but she imagines Charlotte’s room to be the opposite of this; golden and light, a little girl’s princess bedroom morphing slowly into a young woman’s throne room. Jem would bet a fiver that Charlotte Briggs doesn’t have a taxidermy raven sitting on her bureau, and that Charlotte’s room never gets this dark when the lights go out, because Charlotte’s room isn’t black and purple like Jem’s is.

On comes the bedside lamp, filaments fizzing audibly.

Its reflection flares in the mirror on the vanity, a pinprick of light that smudges as the mirror fogs over in a great rush.

Charlotte squeaks again.

A soft clinking noise draws their attention, overloud in the silence; the glass of water sitting propped on Jem’s schoolbooks on the vanity condenses, and then ice freezes across the top. Their next exhale mists in front of their faces.

And then, suddenly, everything’s normal again.

“Nice,” Jem tells Kieren, and the volume on Godsmack burbles in thank you. “I don’t know if all ghosts can manifest physically like that? Like, it took Kier a while before he could even do the trick with the blinds,” and it’d taken the desperation of seeing Jem handle a knife with intent to drive him to that point.

“Jem,” says Charlotte faintly. “Your toilet?”

“Oh, it’s right outside there,” she points. “And it’s a ghost-free zone, promise.”

 _Bzfft,_ fizzle the lights, in a manner that can really only be described as sarcastic.

As Charlotte unfolds her legs and stands, Vickie calls at her retreating back, “Thought that was my line, yeah? I’m the only one here who’s up the duff!”

She chuckles at her own joke, the sound of it only a little strained and hysterical, and eases back to lie flat on Jem’s bedspread, one hand coming up to rest over her mostly-flat stomach. Just like that, Jem Walker’s alone with Vickie Burns.

Fidgeting with one of the pointless zippers on Kieren’s trousers, Jem steals a look at her.

Vickie Burns -- soon to be Vickie Kendal -- is the kind of beautiful that just _explains_ everything. Vickie and Rick, both very handsome people, took martial arts together and wound up together the way the beautiful seem to do, and it _made sense._ She makes everybody else look like they just aren’t trying hard enough: Jem’s sure Vickie puts a lot of effort into just how effortless she looks, with her big brown eyes and her china-doll cheeks and her chest that stretches the screen print on her tee.

She’d been the kind of girlfriend that, at the Legion, Bill Macy had crowed about his son having, and Jem never asked if that’s why Rick did it -- that wasn’t a fair question, to him or Vickie or Kieren.

The silence stretches. Vickie spreads her hands up in front of her face, giving her engagement ring a self-conscious twist.

“Hey,” she ventures, tentative. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

“Sure, what is it?” Jem says, and in the next moment flushes hard with embarrassment: Vickie wasn’t talking to her.

“I just wanted to say,” she says to the general vicinity. “That I’m sorry. I should have -- I should have said something. We -- we stood apart at the service, and I was _so_ aware of it, the way we positioned ourselves, and I shouldn’t have … I should have gone over there, I should have _talked_ to you. I’m sorry, Kieren. We could have been friends, and I --“

“Vickie,” whispers Jem, and Vickie stops twisting at her hands.

She dashes at her eyes, and then gasps, sitting bolt upright.

Every loose particle in the room is floating. Coins, hair pins, earrings, the feathers Jem collects when she takes the woody shortcut to the Lancaster’s, cellophane off her last microwave dinner, bits of tissue and a tampon wrapper (Jem snatches that one and bins it, bright red), her eyeliner pencil and Kieren’s art pencils she’d took from his room. The ends of her hair, too, lift off her back, slowly snaking medusa-like around her head.

Vickie’s hands cage over her mouth. In the doorway, Charlotte cups a floating tracked-in autumn leaf, her eyes saucer-sized in her head.

Jem smiles and leans back in her chair, wrapping her arms around her knees. Her chest feels stretched and cracked in a way that’s like anger but isn’t really anger at all.

 

*

 

Jem’s parents married in the spring of 1993, and it came about mostly because her mother was tired of being Susanne Winkerschtein and decided that she liked Steve Walker well enough to get hitched to him for the rest of her life.

Kieren, then two, would also stop being Kieren Walker-Winkerschtein and simply be Kieren Walker, which was much easier to fit on forms.

Growing up, they’d both assumed that he played some important role in the wedding party, being the bride and groom’s only son, and it wasn’t until Jem was twelve that they learned that no, actually, Kieren had been handed off to Uncle Daniel because he was at the age where he couldn’t be trusted not to make a fuss. Or follow directions. Or do anything important, really.

“Well, that’s rude,” Kieren commented. He’d brought it up because he wanted to redraw one of their wedding photos. “I’m going to add myself, okay?”

Jemima Walker had been her parents’ honeymoon baby, born the following January.

Whenever Mum tells the story, there are always three elements to it:

One, it was January, and the trees were grey and cracked and they knuckled their branches on the window of her hospital room. Two, the lone sight of a dove perched on a telephone pole was the only color in the world, and three, Mum tapped Kieren on the back, trying to get him to look and see the unseasonable bird who’d come to greet his new baby sister.

But Kieren never looked up. Kieren didn’t care about miracles: he was too busy patting Jem on the head the way small children do with dogs, _pat pat pat,_ his expression rapturous.

 

*

 

When Jem was small, and the almost three years separating her and Kieren felt like a vast and insurmountable distance (Kieren had started school, which honestly was the problem,) she used to insist that Wonder Woman would come to her aid.

Why?

Because that’s what Wonder Woman did -- she always came when the little girl needed it, and so, too, would she for Jem.

She became so attached to the idea that she brought it up whenever she could, usually when she wanted to punish whoever had displeased her -- or at least threaten to punish them.

“Just you wait!” she howled under Kieren’s door, where he was furtively shoving the last of her biscuit into his mouth, chewing in triumph -- _her_ biscuit that she had been _saving._ “Wonder Woman’s going to come and _POW!_ you in the face, stupid!”

“Naughty word!” Kieren called back, gleeful to have this second victory so unceremoniously handed to him. “I’m telling -- you said a naughty word!”

Three months in, when this newfound faith showed no sign of waning, Mum took a night and went over to Shirl’s for dinner, leaving Dad in charge.

As he was sitting them down at the table, the door burst open and Wonder Woman strode in.

Kieren’s fork hit the edge of his plate and spun to the floor, but Wonder Woman only had eyes for Jem. She put one hand on her hip, the other resting on her lasso, and said, “What’s this about a girl in trouble?”

She and Jem went into the next room and shut the folding partition, then proceeded to have a very solemn discussion about how Jem was feeling: how she didn’t like that Kieren was at school and she wasn’t, because that meant Kieren had friends who weren’t her and she didn’t have friends that weren’t him, but she couldn’t talk to Mum or Dad about it because they’d just give her the usual excuses and tell her to be patient, and that’s why Jem needed rescuing, don’t you see? She was too small to fix it on her own. She needed help. She needed Wonder Woman.

At the table, Kieren strained his ears trying to listen, indiscriminately shoving roast and greens into his mouth and ignoring his dad’s increasingly amused attempts to lure him into conversation.

When Jem came back in, she was very quiet and wide-eyed. Wonder Woman had left via some other superhuman exit.

Later, of course, they found out that Mum hadn’t really gone to Shirl’s.

She’d stepped out into the shed and gotten changed into a Wonder Woman costume that she’d picked up at some shop last time she went into Manchester. It certainly explained why Wonder Woman sounded like she was from the North, which wasn’t at all how she sounded on the telly.

“I knew that,” Kieren insisted. “I knew it was Mum. It looked like a costume.”

“Uh-huh. Sure you did. So why do I have a very clear memory of Dad picking your jaw up off the floor?”

Mum didn’t do it to encourage Jem to think that fictional superwomen would always come to solve her problems.

Wonder Woman wouldn’t always pull through.

But Mum -- Mum wanted them to know that she would.

 

*

 

Today’s going to be a problem; Jem knows it the instant she comes through the doors, tracking in mud and autumn leaves. A few tenth year boys are clustered in spots like mold off to the right, and they take one look at her and start snickering.

 _Oh, no,_ thinks Jem, and she digs into her pocket for her iPod, dragging her thumb around the volume wheel.

Oblingingly, Blind Guardian start loudly caterwauling about the once and future king, and the sound bubble it creates carries her right on through to first period, where Lisa’s in her seat, bag slung possessively over the neighboring chair. She’s already started into a pack of digestives. She picks one out and gives Jem a worried look as she drops down next to her.

Jem pops an earbud out and asks, “Okay, what happened?”

Lisa opens her mouth, but the others must have been waiting for an opening to strike, because Matthew Cunningham swoops in, grabbing the chair Henry was about to take and swinging it around, straddling it and leaning into Jem’s space to say, “Soooo, Walker, does your brother, like, watch you shower or summat?”

“Piss off!” Lisa snaps, and Matthew guffaws, delighted at his own wit.

With an awful, pitching sensation in her stomach, Jem looks around; several faces are turned towards her, indistinguishable and wide-mouthed with glee, but she’s not looking for them. Amidst all the others, she catches Charlotte Briggs’s gaze, and everything sharpens again.

She glares with murder in her heart, her hands balling into fists, and Charlotte’s expression grows alarmed.

 _What?_ she mouths, but in the next moment, one of the other boys swoops in, his jumper stretched up over his head and arms to make a ghost shape.

“ _OooooOoOoo,”_ he goes, wiggling his fingertips at Jem and Lisa, and the light bulb goes on above Charlotte’s coifed, auburn head.

Her eyes double in size, horrified, and she shakes her head at Jem furiously.

 _It wasn’t me!_ she mouths. _It wasn’t me!_

 _Who else could it be?_ Jem wants to shout back. No one else from the bereavement circle even _goes_ to this school.

Except … Gary Kendal coaches the trapshooting team. They meet for an hour before school to practice clipping clay birds in the lot by the woods. Gary Kendal, whose best mate _and_ fiancé heard Jem Walker confess to talking to spirits.

What would he possibly gain from repeating that to a bunch of secondary school trapshooters, though?

The teacher arrives at that moment, takes in the situation with a glance, and clears his throat with the dawning resignation of someone who doesn’t want to deal with this and hopes it will just go away if he ignores it.

Jem waits until everyone else has settled, their eyes sliding away from her now that she’s not being entertaining anymore, and lets the tension drain from between her shoulders.

“Great,” she mutters, for Lisa’s ears only. “I really enjoyed _not_ being the biggest freak at school there for a bit.” She sinks down, burying her face into her arms on the desktop. “First I was that weirdo with the bum eye and the gay brother who offed himself, now I’m the weirdo who thinks she can talk to her brother’s ghost.”

“You’re not a weirdo,” says Lisa instantly, in a tone that means, _it’s a little weird and I’m not really sure what to do about it,_ but she shifts her chair closer as she says it, like she could put her tall, broad shoulders between Jem and the world if she could, and Jem’s heart pulps a little with affection. “Besides, Kier’d wallop you one if he could hear you talk like that. He didn’t identify like that, did he?”

“Yes, I know,” says Jem with the irrational annoyance of someone being corrected on their area of expertise, and Lisa smiles sideways at her.

At lunch, they sequester a corner table for themselves with all the possessiveness of dragons with precious hoards. Jem’s already planning her outfit for tomorrow: the jacket with the studs, the fingerless gloves that look like brass knuckles, and the black choker, and --

A tray clatters into place across from her, and Charlotte Briggs follows it down, her expression defiant.

“Fuck ‘em,” she says succinctly.

A beat passes -- Jem can’t help darting a look in Karen and Hilary’s direction, wanting to see how they’ll take this -- and then a brown paper sack joins their collection on the tabletop.

“Hiya, Jem,” says Henry Lonsdale, upending the sack to let crisps and an apple and a tupperware of something soupy tumble out. “Lisa. Chaz.”

“Hi, Henry,” Lisa returns, widening her eyes at Jem in a way that makes her want to sink into the earth and claw grass and twigs and dead leaves over herself so she doesn’t have to be here.

“Want one?” Unerringly, the bag of crisps is the first thing to get torn open, and he tilts it towards her. “Heh, Walkers for the Walker?”

“Yeah, I’ve _never_ heard that one before,” Jem fires back in exasperation, and takes one. “No offense, but what the fuck are you doing, Henry?”

“I believe you,” Henry declares instantly.

Lisa and Charlotte look to Jem. Jem stares at the side of Henry’s head.

“That’s nice,” she settles on. “I didn’t ask to be believed, though.”

Henry looks up, and his eyes widen, horrified. “I didn’t mean it like that, I _swear,”_ he goes, pinwheeling his hands. “I just -- I just wanted to say it, I guess, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“It’s fine,” says Jem quickly, mostly just to get him to stop apologizing. “It’s a pretty insane thing to believe.”

“Nah, it isn’t.” Back on comfortable ground, Henry eases his shoulders back. “I absolutely believe that if anyone could come back and successfully communicate with the living, it’d be Kieren Walker. He was that kind of bloke, you know?” A pause, and Henry grimaces. “‘Course you know, you’re his sister, god, that’s a stupid thing to say. I’m just saying, you know, even _I_ knew that, and I knew him really vaguely, you know. You know.”

Nearby, Lisa’s busy doing some pretty acrobatic things with her eyebrows in Jem’s direction, which Jem is resolutely trying to ignore, because if there’s one thing best friends refuse to forget, it’s the boy you took to your first school dance and maybe, _maybe_ snogged a little bit. The whole thing was a disaster, so naturally Lisa Lancaster remembers it in full technicolor detail, in case Jem ever planned on forgetting it.

She sighs.

Henry fidgets and glances at their audience. Lisa quickly schools her face into a polite listening expression. She actually _sees_ the moment he tells himself to be brave.

“Okay, listen,” he leans into her space. “Last year, I had an allergic reaction so severe I went into anaphylactic shock. For a lil’ under a minute, I was clinically dead.”

He says it flat, without theatrics.

“The things I saw …” he trails off. “Trust me, Jem, I believe you.”

“All right,” says Jem for a lack of anything better. She tries not to think of what would have happened if Henry Lonsdale had died. How many funerals can a body go to in a year?

“Anyway!” He turns his attention to his apple. “That’s what I wanted to say, but I also wanted to invite you to join the Roarton Paranormal Society, of which I am an outstanding member.”

Henry-on-parade is back.

“Boreton has a paranormal society?” Charlotte says dubiously.

“Okay, so there are only two of us, but we’re a dedicated duo!” Henry insists, and has the grace to smile when they all burst out laughing.

 

*

 

Jem’s actually mid-nap when Kieren shows up that afternoon, because what else do almost seventeen-year-olds do after school? Even the ones that have theatre and clubs and sports or whatever, they’d still probably rather be napping.

But her iHome skips a beat and then shuffles quietly into the intro to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in hello, and Jem’s eyes pop open.

Already smiling, she sits upright and says, “Okay, I _have_ to tell you what happened today.”

She glosses over the beginning bit, with everybody harassing her, but Kieren’s always been good at reading between the lines. The temperature in the room drops, and the music swells aggressively.

The moment she mentions Henry, though, it hiccups, and Metallica becomes, “ _\-- babe at the high school dance”_.

“Oh, god, I was hoping you’d forget that,” Jem groans. “Yes, he’s _that_ Henry, shut up.”

It skips again, and Jem springs to her feet in horror, advancing on the shelf before she even consciously recognizes the sound coming out of her iHome as “My Heart Will Go On.”

“First of all!” she yelps. “Fuck you, what’s that doing on my iPod? Second of all, _fuck_ you, we were fourteen, Kier! We had _braces!”_

She snatches her iPod out of its dock and waves it threateningly.

“I am controlling this until you _behave._ Now let me finish my story!”

 

*

 

On Jem’s iTunes, there’s a playlist called “Don’t Listen to This.”

It’s an hour long, there are ten songs on it, and all of them have had their titles, track numbers, artists, and album stripped from them. They all read “Don’t Listen to This.” She has them unchecked so they won’t come up on Shuffle.

She could delete them out of her library entirely, she supposes, but maybe someday she’ll be able to come back to them.

She just needs to build the fortitude. Or whatever.

Months ago, when she and Kieren first realized that he could control her iPod, skip it and shuffle it and drag through tracks so that they played only a certain section, in a way that was almost like communicating, she tested it by asking him a dozen questions.

Getting the hang of having a conversation like that wasn’t easy. It’s like trying to speak to someone with a very heavy accent: the words are all there, but it still takes a moment for the sounds to register in the correct order because they’re not being said how you’re used to hearing them. When you’re dropped into the middle of a song, it’s hard to immediately parse out what’s voice, what’s instrument, what’s words, and what those words are, and sometimes by the time Jem isolates the sentiment, Kieren’s already moved on to the next part.

“All right,” she’d said, at around two in the morning, after the important questions had been answered: _are you a demon from hell?_ and _prove it, tell me something only my brother would know._ “All right, all right.”

She put the heels of her hands to her eyes, pressing down.

“All right,” she said for the fourth time, because she was going to do this. “Kieren. Kier. You didn’t even leave a _note,_ Kier. Weren’t we -- couldn’t you have -- _why_ did you do it?”

The temperature in the room rose, fell, rose again.

Her brother played ten songs for her then, and as she listened and listened and _listened,_ Jem’s brain unconsciously flagged them and she thinks of them now as Kieren’s Suicide Playlist. She went to her iTunes and obliterated their names later, told herself not to listen, but she also kept them, because maybe someday she could come back to them.

Maybe someday she’d be able to listen to them and think, _this is how my brother was feeling. Not everybody gets the chance to explain, but Kieren did. Don’t lose this._

Maybe someday she’d be able to listen to them without thinking, _These people have words for what my brother was going through. These people could express it. How come we didn’t see it?_

_If so many people have felt how Kieren felt, then how fucking stupid were we?_

 

*

 

She almost sees him, once.

She’s in front of the mirror, focusing on her hair, tugging on it a bit to see if she can’t get that hump in her ponytail to lie flat so she doesn’t have to redo the whole thing. It’s bereavement circle later, so Jem’s going to trek out to the Lancaster’s in Upper Roarton and pick Lisa up on the way. She’s got on a studded belt and an olive-green vest with the ruff that shows off the flame decal on her sleeves -- she looks, frankly, a bit badass.

She smirks at her reflection. She’s going to need that feeling when she puts the fear of God into Dean Halton. And after that, she’ll have a talk with Shirley Wilson about confidentiality.

Then her eyes slide slightly to the left, and there he is.

It’s the suggestion of a jacket on his shoulders, a hood, hair on his head, that forms the colorless impression of a very long person standing over her shoulder.

She blinks once, and --

In the place where she automatically looks for his eyes -- much higher than where Kieren had been in life -- there are only great, white pits. They look like they’ve been dragged out of his face, smeared down his cheeks. Beneath it, his mouth is a black gash, more shadow than facial feature.

She makes a noise, high and startled.

In the next instant, he’s gone and it’s just her in the mirror, reflecting the built-up mess of her room around her, and she can almost convince herself that it was just something she saw, like when light flickers off some shiny surface in your peripheral and you convince yourself you saw movement.

 _You imagined it,_ she tells herself, and already, the afterimage of him is fading from the inside of her eyelids, even as her heart pounds its way through the fizz of adrenaline.

She knows though. If she was going to imagine her brother, she wouldn’t imagine him like _that._

She couldn’t make it up.

“Kieren?” she ventures, when she thinks she can get her voice to come out steady.

In its dock, her iPod pauses “Raise Hell” and starts switching.

“ _\-- don’t like --“_

“ _Mirrors, mirrors --“_

“You should have said something!” Jem turns around, snatching up the first thing she gets her hands on -- the towel she’d had her hair wrapped in earlier, puddled atop her duvet with the assurance that she’d hang it up at some point.

She hesitates for a beat, scanning the mirror top-to-bottom, side-to-side, hoping in spite of herself that she’ll see him again.

Then she throws the towel over the mirror.

She arranges it, pulling it down to meet the vanity so that no part of the glass shows. “Is that better?”

The blinks flick once.

“Good.”

She takes one step back, then another, until the backs of her knees hit her bedspread. She sits down.

The music breaks, shifts around. She recognizes a rift of her favorite Metallica. A song she doesn’t remember the title of off of Venom’s _Welcome to Hell_ album cuts into Soulfly bellowing their usual opener. Then several songs happen in quick succession, but all Jem makes out is the word “not.” Or it could be “knot” or “naught” -- with her kind of metal, it’s really anybody’s guess. AZ Lyrics can’t even agree, so how should she know?

“Sorry, Kier, I didn’t catch that,” she has to say. The mood of it she understood: remorse and frustration, but the sentiment, no.

He starts to repeat it, but stops when she drops backwards onto the duvet. She rolls over onto her side, drawing her boots up onto the covers. It effectively messes up her attempt at a neat ponytail, too.

She stares at the end of her pillow. A tag for washing instructions sits crinkled close to the seam, completely illegible.

“Is that what you look like now?” she asks curiously.

Long and shock-white and frightening.

A very long pause answers her. Then, at her back, the blinds flap. Once.

“That’s fine, then,” says Jem, fast. “That’s all right. That’s -- that’s --“

She runs out of breath, and stops herself. This time, when she closes her eyes, she’s not in bed. She’s fifteen again. She drove her parents home from the clinic. Everyone had brought black umbrellas to the funeral, even though it was too cold for rain, and Vicar Oddie stood by the open grave and said a lot of kind things that didn’t have much to do with Kieren, but were nice to hear anyway.

She’d tried telling him once, just how large the turnout at his funeral had been, but she doesn’t think he believed her.

Jem doesn’t blame him: Roarton picked the worst possible time to show that even when he made them uncomfortable, they’d still been fond of that Kieren Walker.

“I miss your face,” comes out of her, slow and with difficulty, like she’s trying to scrape it off of the stove of her heart and lungs. Her throat feels burnt, crusted.

_Gone the face we loved so dear, gone the voice we loved to hear._

Jem had picked that epitaph.

“And I _really_ miss your voice.”

On the shelf, her iHome goes dark, and the worn washing instructions blur away indistinctly. “Fuck,” she mutters, lifting her littlest fingers to her eyes to try to wipe them clean without disturbing her make-up. “Jesus Christ.”

Next to her head, the pillow indents. Another dent appears by her arm, and the covers kick themselves around by her feet.

It takes Jem a moment to realize what Kieren’s doing: he’s trying to make it look like he had laid down next to her.

Her mouth wobbles itself into some horrible shape without her meaning to, and she reaches out, curling her hand over the place she imagines her brother’s shoulder would be.

The air warms fractionally under her palm -- not by much, as she gets the feeling it’s much easier for Kieren to make a room colder than the opposite, but enough. It’s like holding her hand right by a lamp, or above a dog’s nose.

“Remember when we were small,” she starts, drawing her hand back and tucking it underneath her chin. “And you were convinced that the only thing that would make you better when you were sick were lots of hugs?”

Air whuffs across her forehead good-naturedly.

“Oh, it was perfectly reasonable,” she generously allows him, flattening her bangs down again. “Sick kids get hugged a lot, and sick kids get better, so you thought hugs must be the cure. You were using inductive logic or something, ‘cos you’re going from a specific to a general -- yeah, see, school’s good for something.

“But one of my earliest memories, yeah, is Mum and Dad had put me down for a nap in their bed. I slept right through dinner and you came to find me -- we’d been playing earlier, I think, and that’s what tired me out? I don’t remember. But you climbed in and wrapped all the blankets around us and I thought you’d get in big trouble ‘cos you weren’t supposed to be around me, I was sick, Mum and Dad didn’t want you catching it too. Sure enough, when I woke up, it was Dad yelling --“ she puts on her best Dad voice. “‘ _Kieren! What_ did we tell you? Get down from there!’”

She laughs to herself. “I woke up and the first thing I said was ‘I told you so’, didn’t I?”

The blinds flap.

“And you _did_ wind up up catching my headcold, didn’t you?”

A pause. Then the blinds flap again.

“Typical.”

 

*

 

She unlocks the side door, putting her shoulder into her shove so that it pops open. Inside the house, Mum’s voice sounds out, “Jem, that you?”

“Yeah, Mum!” she calls back. The car isn’t here, which probably means Dad won this match in the constant battle of Steve Walker vs. Shell, re: his hours. He keeps picking up more shifts at the filling station, and his managers keep asking if he’s not sure he doesn’t want more time off?

She looks back over her shoulder. Standing out on the gravel, Henry hesitates, lifting his head to study the house.

“What is it?” she goes.

He starts, then jogs the last few paces to join her. “Nothing,” he says, and then ruins that attempt at composure by nervously flattening his hair down. “Do I look okay?”

Jem spares him a wry look, glancing first at the turn-up in his jeans and then to his button-up, which is the same shade of lilac that Kieren had worn to his college admissions interview. Henry Lonsdale is the kind of boy who wears basketball shorts when it’s zero degrees outside and insists he’s fine, it’s whatever, no, his lips aren’t blue, what. She fights off a smile.

“It’s just my brother, Henry.”

“That’s just it!” His voice cracks, and his eyebrows hunch together in a miserably embarrassed kind of way. “I’ve never met a real ghost before -- not in a way that isn’t, like, academic or whatever. What if he doesn’t like me?”

“You’ll know.”

Drawn by the voices, Mum comes to investigate.

“Oh,” she says when she spots Henry, and to Jem’s amusement, she also pats her hair down to make sure it’s flat. “Hello, Henry, I thought I heard another voice! Usually these days when Jem’s talking to herself, it’s -- erm.”

“It’s fine,” says Jem. “He knows. He’s with the Roarton Paranormal Society.”

“Oh,” says her mother in a completely different tone of voice. She rallies fast. “How’s your mother, Henry?”

“Fine, Mrs Walker, thanks. How’s work?”

“Oh, fine, fine. Holidays are in full swing, but once those pass, it’ll be less of a zoo.”

“Mum writes the item descriptions for the catalogs that sell our local products and stuff,” Jem fills in at Henry’s perplexed expression. “She gets to do that from home, but it’s a lot of weird shit.”

“Jemima!”

“Well, it is! Okay, fine, usually it’s, like, Cotswold stuff and those quaint English things them’s likes overseas, but one time -- she had to come up with something clever to say about pants and panties that had Tudor faces on the front. I’m scarred forever.”

“Oh, please, it wasn’t that bad.”

Henry grins, catching Jem mouthing _yes it was!_ behind her mother’s back.

Mum darts a backwards glance, then looks at him hopefully. “Are you staying for dinner, then? We’re having pasta, I was just about to put a pot of water on.”

Surprised, Jem studies the earnest expression on her mother’s face. Walkers sit down together for breakfast and dinner. They always have, they always will, and so if maybe … maybe recently Mum has left Jem and Dad to forage for themselves -- Jem’s eaten a lot of microwavable Indian food; Dad’s marginally better at preparing his own -- they still sit down together, Mum across from Dad and Jem across from the empty chair. On those days, nobody asks Mum why she didn’t feel like cooking.

“Yeah, he is, thanks, Mum,” she blurts, and Mum sets her shoulders in a purposeful way.

On the stairs, Henry bounces on the balls of his feet and asks Jem’s back, “So have you had a psychic come look at the place yet?”

“No,” she answers with a frown. “Why would I?”

“To get a feel for the kind of spirit you’ve got here,” he says with assurance.

Jem stops on the landing and turns on her heel.

Henry looks up at her, and when she keeps staring at him, that miserably embarrassed expression makes a reappearance, and his head ducks down towards his shoulders the way a turtle’s would. “Not to be rude or anything,” he says, the way people do when they’re about to be rude. “But … how do you know the spirit you’ve got is really your brother and not … like, something malevolent? Come to kill you in the shower or something?”

She throws her hands up. “Oh my _god,_ what is it with eleventh year boys and watching me shower?”

She doesn’t even wait for the satisfaction of watching him turn flamingly red, she just wheels back around and heads for her room at the end of the hall.

Behind her, his “wait --“ cuts off into a startled yelp, a scuffle, and the terrific _BANG_ of something heavy hitting the floor.

Jem stops.

Henry gets his arms under him and flips himself over, spluttering. “What the --“

He lifts his legs -- the laces of his trainers are knotted together.

“What are you, five?” she demands of Kieren, and the lights _bzzzt_ a raspberry in response.

Henry folds in half, studying the knot, and after a moment, he slips his trainers off his heels in defeat and puts them back against the wall. Lurching upright, he joins Jem in the doorway to her room.

“Woah,” he says involuntarily, rearing his head back to take it all in.

Jem throws him a look. “You’ve seen my room before.”

“No, I haven’t. Your mum and dad made me stay downstairs, remember? If I moved to scratch my nose, one of them swiveled around to stare at me. It was like trying to entertain a pair of very sensitive dogs. No offense to your parents, of course.”

“Oh,” and now that she thinks about it, that’s exactly what they did, wasn’t it? “Well, this is it. Don’t worry about the floor -- if you don’t want to step on it, just kick it out of the way.”

Gingerly, Henry nudges the puddle of Jem’s school uniform with the toe of his sock, clearing a path for him to enter the room.

“Kieren, this is Henry, Henry, this is my brother, Kieren.”

There’s a moment where nothing happens and Jem considers that Kieren’s going to pick _now_ to be a dickhead, but it’s only a moment, and then Henry says “ _woah”_ again, and his breath fogs in front of his face.

Jem holds up her hands to show that they’re empty. Then she puffs out a breath, and hers doesn’t fog at all.

“No _way!”_ Henry’s eyes bug out. “That’s a serious change in ambient temperature! You wouldn’t happen to have a thermographic camera, would you? No, sorry,” he finishes, before she can even truly muster up a sarcastic expression. “I’ll check one out of the library, next I go. How did you do that?” he asks.

He prods at the air in front of his face, which is pretty funny to watch, and then Jem’s iHome chirps its docking noise.

They both look over as it glows awake -- Henry darts a look at her, and again she wiggles her fingers -- and a moment later, Kieren says, “-- _percent concentrated power of will.”_

“Hey!” goes Henry cheerily. “I know that song. It’s Fort Minor, isn’t it?”

Lifting her eyebrows, Jem waits patiently for the other shoe to drop.

It does.

“That was -- _him? Woah!”_ flies out of him for the third time. “Communication! Me! I! Am communicating! With the dead! I am communicating with the dead, me, right now, _actually_ communicating!”

He puts his hands to his head and focuses on breathing, his eyes flared wide open, very very blue even in the half-light of Jem’s room. She sits down on the bed and swings her feet, feeling pretty satisfied with herself, and she’s not even the one doing any haunting.

“Okay, Lonsdale, be scientific about this,” Henry mutters to himself. “You have a supernatural presence here in the room with you, capable of limited communication. Ask questions!” A pause. He makes himself look very ready. Then he looks at Jem. “I’m panicking. I have no idea what to ask.”

“Ghosts?” she prompts.

“ _Ghosts!”_ bursts out of him in an enthusiastic yell. “Oh my god, I’m talking to a ghost. Sir! I’m -- are there more of you? If there are more of you, is there, like, a ghost community? A ghost hierarchy? Like, is there a ghost mayor, ghost police, ghost political elections? Is there ghost school? Do you get trained in things like how to materialize and pass through walls and how to haunt? Do you have ghost friends? Are there ghosts on more than one astral plane? Oh my god, what’s the astral plane even _like?_ Really bright, innit? I remember it being really bright, in fact --“

The music skips.

“ _Don’t mug yourself, mate, just don’t mug yourself.”_

“-- but I wasn’t there for very -- oi! Rude!” But he doesn’t look offended. He looks impossibly pleased.

Affection batters at Jem’s heart. “How about we start with the yes/no questions, Henry.”

“ _You_ can ask him the harder questions though, can’t you?”

She shrugs. “Kind of? It’s a lot of guesswork.”

“Right, ‘cos your vocabulary is limited to what’s on your iPod, isn’t it? May I?” he gestures.

Jem nods the go-ahead, and Henry approaches her iHome. It chimes softly as he disengages it, and Henry asks, “Is that how he first manifested himself to you? By possessing your belongings?”

She draws her legs up, crossing them as she thinks of how to reply. “No -- it was -- he couldn’t used to. I mean, when I first noticed him hanging out, it was still only really little things. But yeah, the music thing developed early? I --“

She stops and shrugs, offhand.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Henry says quickly, picking up on her reluctance.

That, naturally, makes her want to. She straightens her shoulders. “I’d lost my Swiss Army knife, but Bill Macy was willing to sell me a switchblade on the side -- _ow,_ Kieren, let go, you knew he was a shit! -- and I wasn’t even planning on taking it to school, but Kieren didn’t know that. He thought I was going to go after Karen and Hilary again.”

“Again -- ?” he starts, then thinks better of it.

“So I put my earbuds in, and the only thing that would play was ‘Do No Harm,’” she demonstrates mashing buttons, pulling her brow down in puzzlement. “I thought the bloody thing was broken, so I synced it, restarted it, restored it, even, and still, no matter how I changed the settings, all that would play was ‘Do No Harm.’”

It’s one of the songs on her “Don’t Listen to This” playlist, because Kieren had played it to her again later in an attempt to explain self-harm, and Jem hadn’t gotten it then, just how many different forms self-destructive behavior came in.

Henry nods at her slowly. Conversationally, he says, “You’ve got a lot of Fall Out Boy on here. I forgot they’d been a thing.”

“They’re still a thing!” says Jem hotly, and then immediately, “But I only have that on there because they’re really handy, they say a lot with the words they use.”

“Uh-huh, sure, if that’s all,” he replies dryly, and sets the iPod back into the dock. “All I have on mine is Skrillex and Magnetic Man and stuff, so if anybody’s been trying to communicate with my Shuffle, they’re going to have a hard time of it.”

“Skrillex?” Jem draws her hands up, with a full-on “Ryan Gosling confronted with a velcro wallet” kind of disgust.

“Hey now. You were saying -- what made you realize it was your brother?”

She smiles in spite of herself, and starts, “When I was eleven, Kier made me this mixtape,” and on cue, the iHome chimes happily and starts playing “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” the same way it has almost every afternoon: Kieren’s way of saying hello. “This was the opening track.”

They listen -- about thirty seconds in, the recognizable hook starts, and Henry’s eyes widen.

“Oh, man, I love this movie! Did you see it?” She looks at him, eyebrows raised, and he shrugs back at her, feigning nonchalance a beat too late. “I only saw it a couple times, it’s whatever. I just like zombies. Not in the way that, like, Vickie Burn’s fiancé likes zombies, because I’m pretty sure he just likes the idea of being able to shoot undesirable people with impunity, but. Also, Bill Murray was the best in it, _obviously,_ and Emma Stone was --“

The music scratches and flips to “Pocketful of Sunshine” and Jem yells, shooting up off the bed.

“Every time I delete that off my iTunes, you put it back! I’m so sick of that song, how do you even _know_ about that movie?” She jams her finger against the skip button. She and Kieren fight over it for a moment, before, with a cold whuff against her forehead, he pulls back and her iPod skips wildly before settling.

“That’s _so wicked,”_ enthuses Henry, directly at her elbow. “You can change the ambient temperature at will, you can possess technology, and you can do minor physical manifestations -- you are, like, seriously leveled-up, Kieren.”

“Don’t give him a big head!”

“Do you know what this _means,_ though?” Henry grabs at her elbows, then her hands, and grips them tight. “Ghosts can _evolve._ Ghosts are not static imprints left behind like a stamp on the face of this plane, they’re _dynamic_ beings! Capable of growth and change! Oh my god, Jem Walker,” he punctuates each sentence with a vigorous shake of her hands. “Oh my god! This answers so many questions! He answers so many questions!”

He lets go, pacing back and forth across her floor. Clothes and debris scatter indiscriminately at his feet.

He stops, frowns, and half-turns to her. “‘He’, right?”

It takes a moment. “What? Yes.” What else would Kieren be? Unless ghosts were … “That hasn’t changed, has it?” she asks, suddenly alarmed.

The blinds slap open once, then twice.

“Oh. Okay. I meant no offense with the question, promise,” Henry tilts his head one way and the other, an equivocal gesture. “Ghost gender as a topic, though! Okay, okay, we’ll tackle that later, it’s just -- I remember everybody talking about how peculiar your brother was -- which in Roarton could mean anything, really, so I just wondered if maybe that was part of it. When he was alive, I mean.”

If he shrugs one more time, his shoulders are going to pop off and go for a stroll without him.

Jem takes pity. “My brother was bisexual, Henry, and not good at hiding it from the village. He and Rick Macy were a thing.”

He takes this in, nodding very seriously, and after a beat, says, “I don’t know who that is.”

She looks at him.

The moment stretches, and stretches, and suddenly his eyes widen. “ _Yes,_ I do. What!”

_“-- ready for the freakshow, bring them to the floor --“_

_“-- welcome to the circus --“_

“Roarton would find something wrong with all of us,” Jem translates. Some people are just better at hiding it than others. Everyone’s allowed to be peculiar in whatever way they are peculiar, and this is something Jem truly believes --

For other people, at least. It’s harder to believe for herself.

She steps around him, sitting back down on the edge of her bed.

A pause, then the mattress dips as his weight joins hers. They stay like that, studying his socked toes and her boots. She smooths her skirt down and picks lint off her leggings.

“Rick Macy was a military man, wasn’t he?” Henry asks, and when she darts him a curious look, he explains, “I think I’m starting to understand some of the portraits on your stairs.”

She nods.

Henry nods back. “So was my dad,” and he leans back onto his hands.

He’s not vibrating as hard now, and as she watches him silently, he hollows out his cheeks, chewing at the insides of them.

“We’d only been in the Middle East for a few months before my dad was killed in an air strike in Afghanistan. It wasn’t even the strike itself, it was friendly fire, they told us. Why they thought that would comfort us, I have no idea. My friend says that’s why I’m so into all this --“ he gestures around. “Because I’m hoping I’ll find him.”

“I can’t ask Kieren if he knows your dad, Henry. It doesn’t work like that.”

He shrugs. “That’s what I thought. I figured -- if he en’t shown himself to me by now, then he isn’t around. He’s moved on. And that’s all right. But I want to make sure I’ve looked.”

Jem glances around sharply, but there aren’t any objects moving about that she can focus on as Kieren, so just has to settle for looking pointedly into midair. She doesn’t know if she wants Henry planting that idea into Kieren’s head -- the one about moving on.

“When his … well, when Rick died,” and she drags her eyes back to his face, lifting her eyebrows as he says, “Kieren shuttered into himself, didn’t he? Stopped talking, stopped cooking, stopped wanting to do the things that you’d always did for fun, like, I don’t know -- concerts?” he waves a hand at one of the flyers pinned prominently to the cork board above her bed. “And everyone kept telling you that’s fine, that’s to be expected, but --“

The hairs on Jem’s arms go up. She can see her breath. Henry, too, scrunches his eyebrows together when he notices how cold the room’s gotten.

“Yeah,” is all she manages.

He nods. With a shrug, he explains, “My mom. She did the same thing. So I’m just -- I know it doesn’t help now, but I’m just saying, I’ve been there.”

Jem considers this. Drawing her knees up onto the bed and wrapping her arms around them, she ventures, quiet, “How did -- your mom survived. What did -- what did your family do to help her pull through?”

“No, Jem,” says Henry immediately, simultaneous with the angry flapping of the blinds at her back. “Don’t do that to yourself. That’s not fair.”

“ _None_ of it’s fair,” Jem fires back, hair-trigger. “I never wanted my brother to _die._ If we didn’t want him to die, then it was our responsibility to save him!”

Like Wonder Woman! Superheroes don’t always pull through, but families _should!_

_“No --“_

“And the worst part is, I miss him! So fucking much! He’s right here and I still _miss_ him.”

“Then think about that!” His voice is urgent, and he flaps his arms at her. “ _Why?”_

“Why -- what?”

“Why is he here? Why in all the places he could have gone, did he come here to you?”

“He can’t leave here. He can’t leave the property.”

“Yes, but _why?”_

_Because I’m the one who needs him most._

The thought strikes out of nowhere, unbidden, and fells her as cleanly as if a bridge had broken underneath her feet. She breathes around the sensation of falling, and downstairs, her mother calls them to dinner.

 

*

 

She gets home at half-two in the morning, unlocking the door with dread stewing in the bottom of her stomach: she’d seen the lights on from the end of the street.

(If they had just _let her drive,_ but no. It was all, _you drive too carefully!_ and _you slow down and indicate every turn, Jem, you can’t be trusted in a sudden escape._ She hopes they get into as much trouble as she’s about to, the bastards.)

She eases the door open, scrubbing at her cheek with one hand (did she get all the glitter?) and listening hard:

She distinguishes her dad’s voice first, saying “-- did you see the one with the cat that’s a biscuit but also a rainbow?”

And her mum: “Oh, the PopTart one? Yeah, love.”

The voice approaches, and Jem doesn’t have time to dart through to the stairs before her mother’s right there, wearing her dad’s blue tartan housecoat, her greasy hair held back with pins. Her eyes perform only the most minor of judgmental flicks over the state of Jem’s clothes before she swoops in, bullying Jem up into a hug.

“ _There_ you are!” sounds off right next to her ear. “Where were you?”

“Just a show, Mum, it’s fine.”

“Not one of those Lambert farm shows!” says Sue Walker with unerring precision. Her dad pushes his chair back from the computer, peering around the partition. “Oh, Jem, I don’t like the idea of you going to those, there’s no supervision. When I think of how you and your brother used to sneak out … you could have got -- whatever.”

“The only thing Kieren ever got at a Lambert show was laid,” Jem says dryly, and then “kidding!” when her parents’ expressions pinched. “Kidding, Mum, that never happened. Anyway, this time I went with Lisa and Henry and our friend Charlotte Briggs, I don’t know if you --”

“Rudolph Briggs’s daughter?” says Dad with surprise. “I forgot she must be your age. Shame about her dad, he was an all right fellow.”

“Yeah, she’s never been to a show, so …”

And she seemed like she needed it -- the ability to both exist inside your skin and outside of it at the same time, and that’s the unique kind of freedom Jem always gets from really good music. It’s how Kieren coaxed her into being okay with existing when she was eleven, and she’s never gone back. She thought Charlotte might like it, packed in tightly with her and Lisa and Henry, not wanting anything but for them all to be okay. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being ten people deep, music thudding so hard it’s like you could keep going even if your own heart stopped.

Mum and Dad exchange a look over Jem’s head.

“Is bereavement circle going well, then?” Dad asks, mild.

“It’s all right,” Jem answers, short and belligerent, the way you get when you don’t want to admit your parents might have been right about something.

Sometimes Shirley Wilson’s son, Philip, will bring a box of pastries from the Carnforth’s shop on High Street, which really is all you need to turn something from “my parents made me do it” to “this is okay, then.”

It makes her feel ridiculous, and maybe a little dumb, too, just _how_ reassuring it was to hear that she’s not alone, not completely. She’s not the only one who still turns to the empty seat at the table and feels it crush and compact inside her chest, even still, years after she drove her parents home from the morgue. She’s not the only one who feels tender and strange about the oddest things, like the shade of red Kieren used to paint Rick Macy’s funeral portrait -- Jem had to get rid of a shirt that color, and tore off the cover of a book because she couldn’t stand the sight of it. A bottle of Kieren’s shampoo still sits by tub, and when Jem confessed that she keeps it for when she misses him the most, nods went all around the circle, and nobody said a snide thing about it.

It was even, in its own way, reassuring to see Vickie Burns allow herself to finally mourn Rick, that Dean Halton could crunch obnoxiously on a lolly at one meeting and the next, do nothing but talk about how much he misses his mate Freddie. Nina still can’t meet anybody’s eyes, but she gives the best hugs. Irving Kelly, who has a side job selling Christian paraphernalia at a table outside church -- votive candles from Central America, Celtic crosses, books on Christian parenting that had gone out of date when Jem’s parents were young -- and is the only man in town brave enough to go into the men’s loo to clean it after Vicar Oddie had been through, he had stopped coming after the third meeting, during which he stood up and told them how proud he’d been of his daughter Zoe, and how he wanted them to know that, because he didn’t get the chance to tell her when she was alive. He smiles at them on Sundays now; an expression that gives Jem and Lisa permission to smile back.

 _Validation, love, that’s the word you’re looking for,_ Shirley Wilson told her gently, when she expressed this.

“Right!” says Dad brightly, in that tone he gets when there’s been enough feelings around the place for one day. He reaches his threshold after about one or two. “Well, now that everyone in the household is accounted for -- off to bed with you lot.”

“He says, like he’s not going to stay down here and watch more cat videos,” Mum says in an undertone. She wraps an arm around Jem’s shoulder, pulling her towards the stairs. Jem tolerates it.

“By the way!” her dad calls. “Jemima! Thanks for doing the bunting!”

She blinks. “Bunting?”

Mum explains, “I got the bunting out. For the festival? It’s on the 12th this year, or so the parish newsletter said. Anyway, it was big bunched-up mess, and I had to leave it -- every year, I say --“

“‘Don’t bunch the bunting,’” she and Jem say in unison.

Mum smiles wanly. “So thanks for untangling it, Jem, that was really nice of you.”

The swimming feeling’s back in her stomach, and she debates not saying anything, but it comes out anyway, “I didn’t unbunch the bunting, Mum.”

They stop on the stairs and look at each other, Jem with her bottom lip scissored between her teeth, Mum with her hands on her shoulders. Slowly, they slip down to give her arms a squeeze, and then let go. She darts her eyes back and forth across Jem’s face, and she ignores the light on the landing, which hums and goes dark, then lights again.

“I _didn’t,_ Mum.”

“All right,” Mum replies with the carefulness of someone tiptoeing across ice. “If you say so.”

Jem throws a put-upon look towards the top of the stairs, and the light chuckles in response, a low flickering.

Kieren had tried appearing to their parents the same way he’d appeared to Jem, but grown-ups were a shockingly obtuse bunch of people. They moved back displaced items, saying, “huh, that’s weird,” and frowned at the flickering lights, muttering, “I swear we just had the technician in, didn’t we?” Kieren could probably materialize in their mirrors and they’d just say “hm” and go to the GP to discuss the potential side-effects of their meds.

It’s not just her parents, though. Lisa’s her best mate, and she thinks that this is Jem’s coping mechanism. She thinks Jem sees natural phenomena and attributes them to Kieren’s spiritual presence because that’s what she _needs._ She listens to Jem with the patient expression of close friends everywhere, but she refuses to believe anything for herself.

Jem doesn’t mind. Well, much. It’s a two-way street, isn’t it? Lisa _needs_ to know that Kieren’s gone -- that’s her coping mechanism, and there’s no room for ghosts in that.

“So!” she blurts out, before this can get any more awkward. “Does that mean we’re going to the festival this year?”

“I think so,” Mum answers. “It’s about time, don’t you think?”

She shrugs equivocally, starting up the stairs again.

She stops, though, and peeks back. “Does this …” she starts, swallows, and tries again. “Does this mean we’re doing Christmas this year, too?”

Mum regards her for a long moment, then sticks her hands in the pockets of her housecoat. “Why,” and her eyes definitely twinkle. “Is there something you want?”

Jem huffs out an annoyed noise, but then she thinks about it.

“Actually, yeah, I need a bigger iPod.”

Her mother’s eyebrows shoot up. “‘Need’, is it?”

“Yes, need,” Jem insists stubbornly, and Mum’s look of amusement deepens. “The one I have can only hold 8GB of music, Mum.”

“I assume that’s important.”

“Well, yeah, they sell iPods that can hold 32GB now! That’s a lot of songs, Mum,” and the more songs she has, the bigger Kieren’s vocabulary will be, and the more he’ll be able to communicate with her. “I mean, a _lot.”_

She’s expecting Mum to say something along the lines of, _we’ll pass it along to Father Christmas,_ so it throws her off when she stays quiet. There’s silence from the top of the landing, too, until Jem feels a warmth steal reassuringly across the back of her neck.

Then Mum says, “does this have to do with you and … Kieren’s ghost, Jemima?” and Jem feels like she’s tripped even though the stairs are steady underneath her feet. The air at her back goes cold with surprise.

She bristles, and Mum quickly makes her face neutral, nonthreatening, and after a moment, Jem lets herself nod.

The expression that distorts the line of Mum’s mouth then isn’t quite disappointment, but something a lot more complicated. It looks an awful lot like _need._

She steps in, taking Mum’s elbow. “There’s stuff coming out he’s never heard before,” she tells her, making her voice imploring. Anything to get that look off Mum’s face. “Do you know how many breakthrough artists have appeared on the German speed metal scene this year alone? Oh my god, and I read on the Rolling Stones UK site that the Norwegians have done something _fantastic_ and progressive with death metal, and Kieren hasn’t heard any of it, so I’m going to fix that.”

Mum cracks a smile.

“I suppose,” she ventures, as they make their way slowly up the stairs, Mum in her housecoat and Jem still in her Lambert show clothes. “That, ah, German speed metal is different from … death metal?”

“Oh my god, Mum,” says Jem, offended.

 

*

 

She has her suspicions on where they’re going when he leads her up Dove Lane, past the Macy’s house, but it solidifies into certainty when the playground appears on the right, and he leads her around it to the stairs.

“Are you _kidding,”_ she says, and follows him anyway, through the high gates. “You’re not serious. The Roarton Paranormal Society meets in the _graveyard?”_

“Uhh,” Henry returns, frowning back at her with a mock-hurt expression, hand to his chest. “I think you mean _raveyard.”_

And before she can stop him, he puts his hands up in the air and beats out an _“unce unce unce.”_

She pivots. “I’m going home. Bye.”

“Okay, okay, fine,” and she’s already laughing at him when he grabs for her arm, because come on, Henry. “I’ll keep the funky-fresh to myself, promise. I want you to meet my friend.”

Jem’s been to the Roarton cemetery twice since her brother’s funeral: once with Lisa and a bottle of cider and once with her family, the three of them sitting on lawn chairs around Kieren’s grave and eating the birthday cake they made him, which was fun up until Jem opened her big mouth and said, “wish you were here, dumbfuck.”

According to Phil Wilson, there’s a push in the parish council to establish a second burial place for Roarton in the churchyard to avoid overcrowding, but deaths have been slow since in the past year and apparently there’s no real need.

(Phil has no concept of small talk.)

The path curves up the hill towards the groundkeeper’s cottage, and even when Henry says, “there she is!”, Jem still can’t see anyone, until he calls out, louder, and somebody at the top of the hill moves.

It’s the color yellow Jem distinguishes first -- what she thinks is a bundle of yellow flowers becomes a sunflower-print scarf wrapped around a woman’s head, and a yellow coat, and suddenly there’s an entire person in a wheelchair, looking out across the spread of Roarton Valley.

Her profile makes her look like a hairless rat of a woman, too tiny inside her big coat and bigger skirts, but then she turns her torso around at their approach and Jem sees she has the sweetest face, heart-shaped and pale.

She looks at them and smiles an electric smile.

“Henry! Come over here and give us a push then.”

He does as bid, and when Jem sees that the position isn’t intentional, that she’s gotten a wheel stuck in an uneven bit of pavement, she goes over to help, too.

They heave and the wheel pops out of the cement, and Henry complains good-naturedly, “Who let you operate the heavy machinery?”

The air’s so cold today it feels crystalline and breakable, and her breath shows in front of her mouth when she smacks at his shoulder and says, “I borrowed it under the assumption I would have strong arms to help me out in case of tragedy!”

She turns that smile, then, to Jem.

“You must be Jem Walker. I see you’re acquainted with my stalwart bodyguard here.”

“Bodyguard?” Henry echoes incredulously. “More like manservant!”

A hand appears out of the yellow coat sleeve and waves airily.

Henry quirks a smile. “Jem, this is Amy. She’s the founding member of the Roarton Paranormal Society.”

“So good to meet you!” the bald woman, Amy, tells her enthusiastically. She gives the sides of her wheelchair a slap. “Sorry about the equipment, I tire out easily.”

“It’s fine,” Jem says quickly. “That’s why we brought Henry, yeah?”

He rolls his eyes. He’s in his usual uniform of trainers and basketball shorts; Jem has no idea how he isn’t feeling the cold. “Yeah, yeah. Anyway, Amy’s done a lot of studying on ghost activity, so she’s a lot better at seeing them than I am.”

Looking nearly bashful at the praise, Amy waves this away. “‘M not, really.”

Jem looks between them and says, “It’s a proximity to death thing, isn’t it? You become more sensitive to -- er, no offense or anything, I just --“

“You’re all right,” Amy assures her. “You’re not wrong, I’ve been sick my whole life,” and she grins with all her teeth, bringing her shoulders up to give Jem a coy look, saying dreamily, “What gave it away? Was it my rheumy eyes, my skull gone all gorgeous and au naturelle?”

“Yes, that’s it,” Jem responds, wry.

“Thought so. I’m not long for this world, Jem Walker.”

She says it in such a theatrical way that Jem can’t help but smile, because she’s obviously had to say it a lot, whenever she found herself in the bizarre position of having to comfort and reassure people about _her_ illness.

“‘Course, that’s what they told me _last_ year, and look at me,” she spreads her arms. “Boreton can’t get rid of me that easily. Think I’m going to hold out till my nan goes, actually -- be a bit more economical for my parents, burying both of us at once. I have it all planned out. We’re going to go over there --“

She points down the hill.

“That bit there, that’s going to be us. So you could say that I’ve always had a curiosity for the afterlife. A natural instinct. Became a bit of an academic pursuit.”

“I met her in the hospital after my near-death experience,” Henry explains. “That’s how we became a Society.”

“That one’s yours, right?” Amy points in the same direction, but this time Jem can tell she means Kieren’s black granite headstone.

She sets off towards it automatically, before doubling back, shamefaced. There’s no way Amy’s wheelchair can get between the headstones that pockmark the hill separating them and Kieren’s grave; the ground’s too uneven.

“I mean,” Amy continues, seemingly without noticing. “Not _yours,_ obviously, but -- your ghost --“

“My brother,” she corrects. “He died in 2009.”

Amy’s hairless eyebrows lift, and she reaches out, tagging Henry with the back of her hand and saying to him, “That’s the same year you crossed over and came back. I have to know -- what did he pick as his epitaph?”

It takes Jem a moment to realize that last bit was fired at her.

“He didn’t. I did. It rhymed, I -- excuse me, hang on, if you haven’t seen it how did you know that was his grave?”

“Because it’s the only one down that way that’s empty,” Amy tells her happily. “Your brother’s not much one for resting, is he?”

“I --“ says Jem blankly. “Sorry, what?”

“I have a feeling for these things.” Amy’s clearly attempting to be modest. “Just a little one.”

Jem reaches behind her, searching for a headstone or something to sit on. Finding nothing, she goes ahead and carries herself to the gravel and patchy brown grass, thunking down hard. She shifts her bag around front and crosses her legs; she’s in her own jeans and Kieren’s flannel top, the brown-and-grey one he wore a lot when he didn’t want anyone to notice him.

She looks up at Amy and asks, “What’s going to happen to him?”

Amy just kind of shrugs. “Well, anything, I suppose,” is her answer, which isn’t helpful at all.

“There’s a bureaucracy to it,” interjects Henry. “Right? There’s got to be. It’d be chaos, otherwise.”

It earns him a smile. “That’s your theory, is it? Did you come up with that on your own, or did you watch Beetlegeuse too many times as a wee thing?”

“Hey,” he protests. It’s not a denial.

Amy laughs, and on the ground, Jem grinds her back teeth and tries to keep a lid on her frustration.

“No,” she gets out. “I mean, is he going to move on? Is he stuck? How do I --“ _How do I help him get to where he needs to go? How do I keep him?_ She needs both things simultaneously, so much that it hurts.

With a swing of her skirts, Amy leans down, reaching for Jem’s hand and just kind of settling for gripping her shoulder when Jem doesn’t offer it back.

“Honest,” she says, with unblinking eye contact. “For something that’s going to happen to everyone, nobody seems to like talking about it. It’s got everybody so messed in the head, worrying about it -- death. The Big Sleep. I’ve never met a ghost who wants to discuss it even though they’re on the other side, but then again, I wouldn’t either -- who likes complaining about the queue?”

“What _do_ you know?” Jem presses, and Amy considers it.

“I think,” she ventures, carefully, and Jem gives in and scoots closer so that Amy can comfortably hold her hand, since that’s what she seems to want. She thought _her_ fingers were cold, but Amy’s are even worse. “Whatever it is that makes ghosts shift between planes -- and remember, we can only see the thinnest _fraction_ of all that exists out there -- I think must be pretty personal. But ghosts, spirits, the undead, whatever you want to call them, they’re capable of hanging around for a very long time.”

Henry pipes in. “The problem with that is that they get corroded, right?”

“Worn down, rather. Weathered. They start to lose some of what made them who they were in life, kind of like ice melting -- they lose their definition. It’s a process that takes decades, Jem,” she adds, correctly interpreting the expression on her face. “If not centuries. At that point, they’ll usually become one of two things:

“The first is what I would call a redeemer, but most people would better understand as a guardian angel. Generally localized, sometimes specific to a certain family or group of people. The kind of influence you want to keep around -- lotsa good luck, you know?” She gives Jem’s hand a swing, smiling.

“And the other?” Henry prompts.

Amy reaches for his hand, too. He doesn’t seem embarrassed by this -- physical affection must be par for the course with Amy.

“A poltergeist,” she says. “Most people want their houses to be haunted by Casper the friendly ghost, but that’s not always the case. Poltergeists are -- have you ever seen Death Note? No? Okay, well, they’re like, long and -- long. Stretched out, kinda, and smudged. They’ve got a lot more shape than redeemers do, which is why people talk more about evil spirits than they do a good feeling.”

Jem swallows.

“It’s what everyone’s afraid of, isn’t it? Everyone says, oh, the dead can’t hurt you, but that’s the thing -- they do such a good job of it just by being dead, that it isn’t much of a leap of the imagination to think that there’s a spectre out to get you too.”

“Right,” Jem says quietly.

“It also depends on your mindset when you die,” Amy shrugs. “Which is why I’m trying to go out with a good one!”

They stay for a bit longer, Amy explaining more about the various ways ghosts can be classified and letting Henry chime in with tidbits he’d read on the Internet, until they simply get too cold.

“And hungry!” Amy adds. “Doesn’t being in a cemetery just make you _famished?”_

They get spring rolls from the Nguyen’s restaurant on High Street, and as they eat, Henry fills Amy in on his encounter with Kieren at Jem’s house. She asks all the right questions, and upon leaving, Jem gets the feeling she’s been made a new and honorary member of the Roarton Paranormal Society whether she intended to or not.

“I’d like to meet him sometime,” Amy tells her as they part ways outside a narrow bungalow house in Lower Roarton, where someone’s left a light on for her. “It won’t hurt to have a few friends waiting for me when I get to the other side, right?”

Henry walks her back home, hands shyly shoved into his pockets. “Well?” he asks, as they turn towards Jem’s street. “Do you like her?”

“Is she always like that?”

Henry doesn’t have to ask what she means. Being around Amy is a lot like having a light bulb flashed in your face. “Like she’s already decided that she’s your best friend and is just waiting for you to realize it too?”

Jem nods.

“Yeah, she is,” and they grin at each other.

“Thanks,” she blurts out, before she loses the courage. “For trusting me with her.”

Again, Henry doesn’t need her to explain; it’s that nervousness that comes with introducing a person to someone that’s indescribably important to you. He nudges her with his elbow. “Thanks for trusting me with your brother.”

She waves good-bye at the gate, and she’s almost reached her front door when he calls out.

“Wait, Jem!” He jogs up to her. “This is for you.”

The next thing she knows, a bracelet’s being shoved over her wrist.

It’s loose; she has to spread her fingers out to keep it from slipping off. She holds it up to the light coming from the porch, studying the collection of small, colored beads that ring around it. There’s no pattern to it; all the stones are different shapes and textures.

“Certain stones are amplifiers,” Henry explains, sounding peculiarly apprehensive about it. “I think it’s different depending on the person and the ghost, and obviously you and Kieren don’t need any help communicating, but I just thought …”

Jem smiles. In between the stones, three tiny wooden blocks spell her name.

She looks over at Henry, and he’s staring back at her in a way that makes her, suddenly, feel very aware.

She watches them both register the moment for what it is, and then Henry moves closer.

His eyes are very, very wide. He looks terrified.

“Can I --“

Jem almost panics, because is her hair neat? (No. They’ve been traipsing all around Roarton, it’s probably a horrible mess.) Is her breath fresh? (No, there’d been scallions in those spring rolls!) Oh, god, does she have five o’clock shadow on her upper lip? Is she going to give him a rash? Is he going to give _her_ a rash? Does she actually have more facial hair than Henry Lonsdale?

“Yeah, go ahead,” she manages, her heart soaring and overlarge and she’s -- she’s about to get kissed.

With all the awkwardness of a very large bird trying to peck at something very small, Henry steps into her space and leans in for her mouth.

Jem catches him, bracelet dropping around the cuff of her flannel. She holds him in place and kisses back.

This goes on for a minute or two, both of them suspended in it like they’re walking on a tightrope, perilously high, not daring to do anything more than make small movements and tiny steps. Her hands feel bizarrely large and clumsy where they’re holding his wind-chilled face, and she doesn’t know where to put her feet.

When she’s had enough, she opens her eyes -- and immediately breaks away.

“ _Kieren!”_ she bellows.

The climbing ivy that had, stealthily, been pulling itself off the trellis and coming to rest, poised and ready, above Henry’s head, drops harmlessly to the gravel at their feet with a _whumph._

“ _Go away!”_ she shouts. “I’m having a snog!”

The porch light flickers with laughter, and then the ivy shakes, the shutters rustle and creak, and a sleeping bird nesting in the eaves chirps indignantly. Each sound marks Kieren’s retreat.

Jem turns back to Henry, who’s wide-eyed and red-mouthed.

“Was that --“ he starts, and she says, “-- shut up.”

“No really,” he tries, fending her off. “I thought you said he was only capable of lifting really lightweight things, like keys and sweets.” He points at the ivy. “That’s not lightweight.”

“And I thought you said that Kieren proved that ghosts were dynamic, changing creatures, now come here --“

This time, the kiss is more of a laugh, and it’s great, actually, thanks for asking.

 

*

 

They’ve found, mostly by trial and error, that Kieren can accompany Jem to the end of the Burtons’ property line and not a step further. He can be a cold wind mussing up her (combed, thank you!) hair and a voice in her iPod, and the next second, nothing.

Henry’s talking about renting equipment from the library so they can determine why that is -- what’s so special about the space around the Walker’s house? Why is it so arbitrary? -- but today, coming home, it’s not really on Jem’s mind.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket, where she’s got her hand curled around it, waiting for exactly this.

_It’s a boy!_

Grinning, Jem strips her gloves off so she can text Vickie back, _Congratulations!!!!_

She gets her hands tangled in her earbuds, knocking one loose, and with a stab of frustration, she shoves it back into place. It’s quietly playing something she remembers adoring when she was thirteen -- My Chemical Romance, probably. Something she listened to and felt _understood,_ if only for a moment.

She gets a reply. _Ta. Don’t tell Gary, k? Not just yet._

_It’s fine. We’re not bros. Do u need a ride home from the GP?_

_Nah, I’m good Thanx_

The sidewalk curves her past Ken Burton’s house, and she tucks her phone away, when suddenly --

Her iPod Shuffles of its own accord and the volume _skyrockets,_ screeching guitars blasting out Jem’s eardrums. With a shout of pain, she rips her headphones out of her ears, knocking her iPod out of her pocket at the same time. It skids on the cement, and she chases it, the other hand pressing against her ear.

“What the _fuck_ was --“ she starts, looking up, and stops.

The lights are flashing haywire through the windows of her house.

Fear obliterates everything. She snatches up her iPod and sprints for home, crashing through the gate. She’s already shouting, “Kieren, _Kier!”_ as she shoves her key into the lock, shouldering the door open.

It bangs off the wall. She grabs it, slamming it behind her before she goes skidding into the kitchen.

“Kieren!”

A noise, like choking -- the dining room.

She runs, grabbing the doorframe and using it to propel her around the corner, her hair swinging behind her.

Something crunches underfoot, and she pitches to a stop.

A shelf lays shattered on the floor, shards of glass scattered as far as the hall closet, the computer, directly under Jem’s boot. Three of the fancy masks her parents bought off eBay are now little more than debris.

In the middle of the mess, Sue Walker holds the broken pieces of one in her hands. She’s in her housecoat, her hair unwashed, and the only thing that makes this a change from the usual is that she rocks until her forehead nearly touches the floor and she _wails._

It is, at once, the most horrible and terrifying sound Jem has ever heard.

In her hand, Kieren’s guitars and drums screech tinnily.

Jem’s first instinct is to panic, too, because _good god, woman, you’re an adult, you’re my mother, pull yourself together, I can’t handle this,_ but it immediately passes.

“Mum,” she says, stepping carefully around the table. “Mum?”

But her mother’s crying too hard to reply, her face still pressed to the floor. She rocks, keening.

“Come on, Mum,” Jem says on a wobble. “Come on, sit up.”

Using her gloves, she brushes a patch of the hardwood clear of glass so she can budge up next to her mother, physically manhandling her upright. Sue Walker must have knelt down in glass, because there are streaks of blood on her knees, smeared onto her hands and already dried brown. Jem scrubs at these spots ineffectually.

“I --“ heaves out of her mother, words shuddering through her pitching chest. “I didn’t mean -- I was just squeezing by and it -- it _broke --“_

It takes Jem a moment to realize she’s talking about the shelf.

“Oh my god, Mum, that doesn’t matter. Are you all --”

“It _broke_ and I can’t _fix it --“_

“Kieren,” Jem calls for her brother, her voice urgent, because Mum’s words are dissolving into wailing again. “Can you bring her some water, please. Mum, here, hold my hands, hold on to them now, are you holding -- good, now _breathe.”_

Mum squeezes down on Jem’s hands so hard she feels her bones grind, and it’s another minute before her sobs stop coming so hysterically.

In this time, a glass scoots its way in ungainly stops and starts out of the kitchen. Half its contents spill out before it gets to them, but Jem snatches it up with a “thanks,” and then she sits back as her mother sips the rest of it empty.

“It’s broken, Jem,” she says weakly, her face crunching together. More tears leak down her cheeks. “It was fine, it was a good thing and we were proud of it, and now it’s _ruined.”_

“They’re just masks,” Jem tries. “We could get more if they’re that --“

“But we’d _know._ We’d all sit down and we’d know that that shelf is different because I broke the first one. I couldn’t even keep a damn shelf together, Jem. I _couldn’t,_ I _failed this family --“_

“Mum, _no!”_

“I did, I did, Jem, we were fine and then we fell apart, and there was nothing I could do.”

They are not talking about the shelf.

Mum stares at the glass in her hands. Her voice is graveside quiet. “I’m so angry at him, Jem. I’m so bloody mad at him I think I could kill him again.”

The lights in the next room plunge.

“No, I couldn’t,” Mum corrects herself, shaking her head. Jem bites at her lip. “I couldn’t harm -- but I’m so angry at him, I am. I can’t help but think, he _did_ this to us, and I’m trying -- trying to forgive him, but I’m _furious!_ What kind of mother does that make me?”

“That’s called _grieving,_ Mum,” Jem’s crying now, too, her voice straining around it.

Shirley Wilson said it was okay. You have to let yourself feel what you feel, that’s the only way through it.

“Okay, okay,” she stands up. “I’m going to get you more water, and I’m going to get a broom and a dustpan and I’m going to sweep this up so we don’t hurt ourselves. I’m --“

She leaves the room, and as soon as she’s out of sight, she puts her back up against the wall and allows herself thirty seconds to hyperventilate, pressing her knuckles into her eyes. Tears dash themselves down her cheeks, and they freeze before they reach her chin.

Her breath fogs, and cold air prickles painfully into her lungs.

Surprisingly, it helps, and the urge to cry eases away.

She straightens her shoulders and says to the ceiling, “If I could hug you right now, I would,” and then she turns and sprints up the stairs.

She hesitates on the threshold of her parents’ room, fighting off the instinctive, childish fear that Mum and Dad’s room is off-limits, and heads on through to their closet. It is, as she expects it to be, pushed to the end of the bar on Mum’s side, with all the other clothes she doesn’t wear anymore.

Jem unhooks the hanger from the bar, turning around and holding it up against her shoulders to study herself in the mirror.

“What do you think?” she asks, and after a beat, the blinds flap.

“Good,” she says. “Now get out, I need to change.”

Mum’s right where she left her when she gets back downstairs, empty glass at her side and a new one in her hands, and Jem steps gingerly over the shelf and bits of mask to reach her -- the boots are a size too large, and she’s slipping inside them.

Her hair’s loose across her shoulders and down her back, held in place by a circlet, and she puts one hand on her hip, the other on her lasso.

When Mum looks up, she says, “Now what’s this I hear about a woman in trouble?”

And her mother’s eyes go enormous, a second before they fill again, and she murmurs in a vague and watery way, “Oh, Jem.”

The old Wonder Woman costume creaks faintly as Jem crouches down next to her.

She takes her hand and says solemnly, “I’m going to let you in on a secret, Susanne Walker-Winkerschtein. There’s no easy way for me to fix this. I can’t punch this whole situation okay again. And neither can you.”

She shakes her head. “That’s okay. You feelings are valid. They are yours and _you_ are valid. You’re allowed to feel them. You’re allowed to be mad at Kieren. You’re allowed to be mad at your husband -- he’s been withdrawn, he’s been a jerk,” and Mum huffs out a laugh, surprised. “You’re allowed to be mad at your daughter, she’s --“ Jem casts around. “For being unreasonable and standoffish.”

Mum reaches up, tucking a lock of Jem’s hair behind her ear.

“It’s not your responsibility to fix them, or clean up after them, or even to keep them from falling apart. You’re not Wonder Woman. You are _you_ and you are fine as you are, okay? You’ll get through it and so will they.”

“Oh, Jem,” says Mum again, so softly. “How did you turn out so well?”

It’s so unexpected that it throws Jem right out of character.

“Well?” she echoes incredulously, sitting back and suddenly feeling silly, an eleventh-year girl sitting on her floor in a plastic skirt and red-white-and-blue bustier. It gives her the drive to say, “Mum, I’m one knickers-twist away from getting expelled. I’ll be lucky if I get level 1 GSCEs --“

“Jem.”

“-- nobody’s going to hire me and Roarton’s going to talk about me behind my back and I’m going to have to live with you all my life.”

And all at once, it’s her mother there, gripping her shoulders.

“Do you think your dad and I would mind that?” she says fiercely, and Jem _sees_ it -- the mother she hasn’t seen in months, hidden behind the unmotivated, unwashed woman that had fogged her over. “Jemima, I don’t care about your GSCEs or if you get any A-levels, my god, you could tell me you want to be a -- a _goldfish_ and we’d do what we could to support you.”

Jem stares at her, shocked wordless.

Mum smooths her hair down, and cups her face. “Look at you. My girl. My only girl, who rescued me today. I am _so proud_ to know you.”

And, completely unable to do anything else, Jem leans for her and Mum leans back, and they stay like that, embracing each other amid the broken pieces of masks, the sharp glass, while above their heads, Kieren makes the lights hum.

 

*

 

It snows the day of the festival, in small, hard flakes that the wind picks up and drives into their faces. Lisa tries sticking her tongue out to catch some, but this just kind of winds up being a bad plan.

Mr Lancaster, whose toffee apples and mead makes his stall one of the most popular ones every year, sees them tumble into the church hall shivering and laughing and fixes them each up a toddy, even though they’re still largely underage.

“Wait, what!” exclaims Amy. “Give me that, then!”

“Oi!” Jem protests, but her drink has already exchanged hands.

It’s a good day for Amy, so she slings her arms through theirs and marches them around the rest of the stalls. Her head’s wrapped up in a paisley print today, a knockout neon orange and green -- she says she’s still looking for the perfect wig, “because frankly, my dears, I don’t have a lot of life left to waste on anything less than exactly what I want.”

They reach the bean-bag toss, and Amy squeals with the kind of delight that the bric-a-brac definitely doesn’t deserve.

She promptly spins around and sizes them up, then latches onto Lisa as the tallest and most fit.

“You’re going to win me _that!”_ And she points at her prize -- a tiger plush high up on the shelves.

“Yeah, all right,” Lisa says agreeably, and smiles at Mr Nguyen, who’s in charge of the stall.

Jem turns away -- as Lisa’s best mate, she knows exactly how good she is, she’s seen it all before -- and Henry tugs at a forelock that’s escaped her ponytail, drawing her attention to him.

“Do you want me to win you something?” he offers gallantly.

She snorts. “Unless it’s an iTunes gift card, I’m not interested.”

“I wouldn’t mind that mug, though,” Charlotte pipes in from Jem’s other side, still sipping on her toddy. The mug in question is ceramic and a very deep shade of cobalt blue.

Theatrically, Henry starts rolling up his sleeves, falling into line behind Lisa, who’s handing the tiger off to a rapturous Amy. Jem laughs, laying a hand on his chest and edging him out of the way.

“Stand aside,” she tells him. “I got this.”

She turns to the indulgently smiling Mr Nguyen, who hefts a small bucket of bean bags over the barrier for her in exchange for a token. The distance marker he points her to is laughable, and Jem makes a show of flexing her muscles and kissing her biceps in a way that sends Charlotte into stitches and Henry, Lisa, and Amy fake-swooning all over each other.

Then she scoops up a bean bag and --

The sense memory is as sudden as a recoil kick to the chest.

Jem loses breath for a moment, overwhelmed by the sensation of having stood here in this exact place, years before, while behind her Rick Macy hooked an arm around her brother’s neck, pulling him in to flush his mouth against Kieren’s ear, whispering something that, at thirteen, Jem had been so certain had been about her.

He caught her looking and grinned with all his teeth.

 _So us what you got, Jazz!_ he called encouragingly.

Kieren may have taught her the important things, like how to belch impressively on every try, but Rick Macy taught her how to shoot and how to throw like she wanted it to hurt.

 _Breathe,_ she tells herself. _Breathe through it. You are here, now, with your friends, and the dead are not here to hurt you._

She cranks her arm back, and throws.

It’s still snowing, later, as she makes her way home, crunching down to the pips on one of Lisa’s dad’s toffee apples. The volume on “Four Leaf Clover” is a smidge too loud, which is why she doesn’t hear the racing engine coming up the street until the Ranger squeals to a halt beside her, leaving black skids on the tarmac.

The nearside door pops open, and Jem startles backwards as Gary Kendal launches himself out of the car, nearing strangling himself on his seat belt.

He bears down on her with a spitting fury, the whites of his eyes showing.

“ _You!”_ comes out of him in a roar. “What did you do!”

“I --“ Baffled, Jem glances up and down the street, but there’s no one else around except for Kenneth Burton, up on a stepladder with a pair of hedge-trimmers, and he hasn’t seen them yet. “What?”

Gary seizes her by the arms, and Jem’s confusion catapults straight into alarm.

“Hey!” she snaps.

“What did you say to her!”

“I don’t know what you --“

“My Vickie!” He shouts right into her face. “She’s gone! She took my baby and she left!”

Jem heaves him off of her, stepping back until her heels hit the edge of the gate behind her. “What do you mean, left?” she asks, even though she knows: it’s been in Vickie’s eyes for weeks now, the way she set her shoulders, and three days ago, Jem heard voices outside and found her leaning against her garage door, talking at nothing, and when Jem stepped out in her socks, the porch light flared brightly and Vickie said, an indescribable note in her voice, _yeah, you too,_ before smiling and leaving.

“I mean, she took all of her stuff and the _ring_ and she must have changed her number, because it’s not ringing through, and … I don’t know where she _is,_ except she’s clearly not coming _back,_ god. _God.”_

He paces in a tight circle, scraping his hands over his head. The Ranger at the kerb dings faintly out its open door.

Jem’s chest constricts, a feeling inside of her both wretched and proud.

“Well,” she says angrily. “Good on her.”

It’s a fatal thing to say. Gary swivels, fixing her with the precision of a sniper rifle.

“I knew it had to be those _fucking_ meetings.” He surges right into her space, spitting his words out through gritted teeth, and jabs his finger at her. “She weren’t the same once she started going to those. This is your _fault.”_

She scoffs. “I don’t see how it’s anyone’s fault. She wanted to leave you, she left you.”

“But I was going to marry her!” Gary shouts. “We were going to have a _baby!_ That’s _my_ job. Mine! I swore to protect her and our kid my whole _fucking life!”_

 _Wow,_ Jem thinks, eyes widening. _You’re a trip._

“Yeahhh,” she drags out. “Looks like she doesn’t need your protection, mate.”

She turns away, done with this already, and she gets three steps before her earbuds crackle and cut and a voice screams, “ _JEM LOOK OUT.”_

Gary charges her then, and she twists around too late -- he grabs her ponytail as it whips around.

He yanks with all his weight and she _screams,_ hairs ripping free from her scalp, and the next thing she knows, he’s got her hair wrapped firmly around his wrist so that her head goes where he wants it, and her throat lands in a chokehold. Clamping her against his chest, he drags her back one step, then two, and Jem lifts herself up onto tiptoes, whimpering and trying to ease the pressure off her throat.

Through her watering eyes, she sees that Mr Burton’s dropped his hedge-trimmers and is running for them, gimping hard on his bad leg. His mouth opens in a shout she can’t hear.

She claws at the back of Gary’s hand.

“Fucking --“ he pants. “ _Bitch.”_

She writhes, trying to drive her elbow into his gut, but the leverage isn’t there. Her vision blurs.

And then --

Then --

The pressure’s gone.

Jem lands knees-first with a crack she feels, her hands scraping the pavement. She gasps down air and then _moves,_ scrambling across the sidewalk to put as much distance as possible between herself and Gary before she flips over onto her rump to face him.

But he isn’t there.

She darts her eyes around, but Gary isn’t behind her or near her -- his car’s still at the kerb, and --

And Jem looks up.

Gary Kendal hangs suspended twenty feet off the ground. He is brown and crooked, bent out of shape like the autumn leaves Jem’s been tracking in for weeks.

He chokes out this horrible, _horrible_ noise, and in response, something --

 _Something_ wrenches his spine, neatly, folding it at an angle spines are not meant to go. Jem’s hands fly for her ears, gasping, because she absolutely does not want to hear the kind of sound that’s going to make when it breaks.

Gary lets out a strangled yell, and then he stops making noise altogether.

As she watches, his face starts to purple, his hands clawing at his throat like there’s something wrapped around it.

She thinks of Amy, saying, _poltergeist._

She drops her hands and cries, “Kieren, _don’t!”_

The temperature plummets.

Her brother’s fury is a palpable thing, a sound in her ears that’s only a sound in that it’s the complete absence of sound, and she remembers his corpse-white reflection in the mirror, his face that was like an oil painting someone had decided against before they were finished, dragging his features into each other with prejudice. She remembers the longness of him, and she remembers the first time she climbed into the driver’s seat of her parents’ car, after, and turned her head like she expected him to be there in the backseat, like he’d been the day Rick Macy gave her a driving lesson.

Her hair lifts off her back. Loose gravel floats all around her.

“ _Kieren!”_

Gary drops.

He dips right before he hits the ground, killing his momentum, and thus lands on his feet.

He staggers and swings around, his fists up. He spins left, then right. His lips are blue and frost coats his beard.

Jem stands slowly, and his attention telescopes down to her, the only thing he can see.

His brows hunch and he starts towards her. Jem braces her feet and tells him, “you fuck right off,” and on the next step, his whole body wrenches backwards, arm twisting itself of its own accord.

He howls. Fingerprints appear on his arm, a grip coming up red, and Kieren throws him backward.

Gary stumbles, shoving himself upright, and with one last look at her, he bolts.

Not even bothering with his car, he leaves it there, the door still hanging open. Jem waits until he’s disappeared around the corner at the end of the lane, and then lets herself sag on unsteady knees. Her scalp _aches._

She blinks. They’re way past the Burton’s property line.

Her head comes up. “Kieren?”

Trembling, she scans the ground. The contents of her pockets are scattered there; phone, iPod, keys. She picks these up, and returning phone and keys to her pockets, she adjusts her earbuds and tilts her battered iPod’s screen towards her.

“Kier?” she tries, but there’s nothing.

She hits play.

Nothing.

Her breath mists in front of her mouth, which makes her heart leap for a second before she remembers that, no, it’s just that cold out today.

She lets her head fall back. Her mouth crumples. “Kier?” she tries, one more time.

Ken Burton arrives, his flanks heaving, and gets a solicitous hand under her elbow, helping her to her feet. “What was _that?”_ he goes, wide-eyed behind his glasses, and she can’t manage to do anything except shake her head.

And then her earbuds crackle.

“Hi, Jem.”

She barely has time to suck in a startled breath, elation swelling deliriously inside her chest, because that’s her brother’s voice -- her brother, her brother she thought she’d never hear again! -- before Kieren realizes exactly what he just did, too.

It bursts in her ears. “Jem! Jem Jem Jem -- Jesus Christ, Jem, do you know how many times I have to say your name before I’m caught up, I missed _so much --“_

And Jem Walker stands in the cold December light with her iPod in one hand and the other over her mouth, tears squeezing down her cheeks, and she laughs.

She laughs and she says with so much joy it hurts, “Hi, Kieren.”

 

 

**Three years later:**

A dove sits on the “For Sale” sign outside the Walker’s front gate, which doesn’t strike her as strange at all until she remembers that it’s January.

“You’re a bit lost, aren’t you?” she says to it, when it shows no sign of fleeing at her approach. It doesn’t budge until she unlatches the gate from underneath it, and even then, it hops off only grudgingly. “Silly bird,” she mutters, and totters carefully over the gravel to the front door.

Mrs Lonsdale opens it to her knock, and promptly embraces her without giving Vickie time to decide if she wants it or not.

“We was wondering where you went!” she ushers her inside.

“Sorry,” Vickie says. “Someone said her husband was out, so I popped over to Janet Macy’s to see how she was doing.”

Mrs Lonsdale’s brassy eyes crinkle, surprised, and she takes Vickie’s coat. “That’s awful nice of you, dear. Heaven knows that poor woman needs all the escape she can get.”

“She’s going to knife Bill through the eyeball one of these days.”

“No will hold it against her,” Mrs Lonsdale says mildly, and then, “Did you get anything to eat, Vickie, dear? You should take a slice of cake -- Henry and I made it, it’s a marble cake and it’s delicious, even if we had to get the recipe off the Internet. The flowers took an _age,_ but they came out rather well, I think.”

Not that there’s a lack of flowers; the Walkers’ house is covered in them, paper flowers stringing the mantle, photo frames of the deceased crusted with them; red poppies, yellow lilies, dozens of small blue flowers Vickie doesn’t have a name for. They move through the room, black-suited villagers moving out of the way, forming little clumps that break away and reform like clots.

All the women present wear flowers pinned in their hair, Vickie included -- Amy had specifically requested that bit in her will.

“I’m all right, thanks,” she says quietly. “I’m actually looking for Mrs and Mr Walker? They said they’d watch my son for me.”

She scans the room at about knee-height, but no dark little head appears. It does attract Mr Lancaster’s attention in time for Vickie to catch the judgmental way his eyes flick from her pumps up her bare legs to the hem of her black skirt.

She ignores it: Vickie Burns has always worn her heels too high and her skirts too short for Roarton.

“Oh, he’s upstairs,” says Mrs Lonsdale. “Can’t you hear him?”

She blinks, then listens. Now that she’s paying attention, she can, actually: there’s a _thunk_ from upstairs, like something heavy hitting the wall or the floor, followed immediately by a muffled, childlike laugh and a “again! Again!” It’s easy to lose among the dull murmur of funereal conversation.

“What is he _up_ to?” she mutters at the ceiling.

“It’s a bit boring for a little tyke, isn’t it,” and Vickie blinks again, lost for a beat. She hadn’t actually been referring to her son. “They don’t quite understand at that stage. Good of Jem to have a romp with him, keep him entertained.”

“Yes, of course,” says Vickie hastily: behind Mrs Lonsdale’s back, Jem herself just walked into the room, accompanying her mother and Shirley Wilson. The women carry another platter and a stack of napkins, and Jem follows behind them with a lighter for the tea candles. She meets Vickie’s eye and smiles, then points at the ceiling. The gesture makes her focus stones clunk heavily around her wrist.

“It’s so good to see you, Vickie,” Mrs Lonsdale jumps in, correctly interpreting Vickie’s readiness to leave. “Thank you for coming all this way, Amy would have been touched to see you.”

Amy Dyer didn’t know Vickie from Adam, but actually, no, Mrs Lonsdale’s right, Amy probably _did_ love her simply by fact she was an extension of Jem and Henry and Lisa and Charlotte, and by fact that Vickie Burns was infamous as Rick Macy’s ex-girlfriend who dumped Gary Kendal and did a runner with his engagement ring and his baby.

“You keep an eye on Jem now,” Mrs Lonsdale finishes with, and Vickie spares her a perplexed smile.

“Jem and I live in different towns, Mrs Lonsdale. We can only get out there on weekends, sometimes.”

“You’re still a lot closer to her than she is to us,” Henry’s mum says, very quietly. “Which is understandable, I s’pose.”

On her way to the stairs, Vickie passes Mrs Walker, who has a string of daisies woven into her short, soft-looking braid, her face wane but smiling, and Mr Walker, to whom Lisa’s mum is saying, “-- didn’t have any family left, did she? She outlived them all? It’s good of you to handle the funeral arrangements, Steve.”

“S’all right,” says Steve Walker uncomfortably. “I’ve had the practice, haven’t I?”

Everybody grimaces.

It’s quieter on the stairs. Vickie climbs them slowly, scanning the paintings on the wall.

“Kieren?” she calls. The landing creaks underfoot.

She passes the room that had been Kieren Walker’s, the door half-open. Because she’s here and she’s curious, she pokes her head in and finds that it’s now clearly a showroom for the realtor -- the decor is modern, impersonal, and there isn’t a dead raven or mask in sight.

A noise, stifled, comes from the room at the end of the hall, and her son hisses, “ _shhh,_ they’ll hear you!” in what she imagines he thinks must be a subtle way.

Smiling, Vickie shuts the door and heads for Jem’s old room.

Whatever energetic activity her son had been doing that made so much noise must have ceased at the sound of her approach; now he’s sitting demurely on the duvet, trainers swinging above the carpet. He straightens his back and looks at her wide-eyed, and his composure breaks almost immediately when he sees it’s just her. He giggles, swallows it, and giggles again, the way kids do when they think they’re getting away with something.

Vickie puts her hands on her hips and studies the rest of the room. The duvet’s a mess from where he’d been climbing on it -- she can kind of see how the activity went: clamber on the bed, launch off, get caught and swung around through the air, set down, do it again.

“All right, monkey,” she says. “It’s time we got going. Say good-bye.”

Kieren hops off the bed, beelining for her and stretching his arms out, demanding to be lifted. She isn’t supernatural, so she doesn’t think she manages it quite like he wants, but he gets settled on her hip and twists his body around.

“Bye, Big Kieren!” he calls to the empty room, waving with his whole body. “Bye, Amy!”

Vickie startles, and before she can stop herself, she looks directly into the only mirror in the room.

Jem’s student housing room at Norfolk has all of its mirrors covered, and if she’s ever over at theirs, she’s prompt to warn them, _don’t look into the mirrors if you don’t want to see what’s there._

In the reflection, Kieren’s shape stands sketched into the air by Jem’s vanity, caught in the act of waving back.

He tilts his eyeless face towards her and smiles, and there, beside him, looking like something she would have dismissed as a smudge on the glass, a trick of the light, if she didn’t know better, is a small, dove-white shape. It winks at her, too impossibly bright to look at.

Her Kieren shoves at her with his feet. “Mum!” he admonishes her. “Say bye!”

“Bye, Kieren,” says Vickie Burns, giving her son a squeeze around his middle. “I’ll see you when you get back, yeah? And bye, Amy -- we’d love to see you again.”

And the blinds flap back at her.

 

 

-

fin

 

** aleatory, adj.  
** relating to or denoting music that has been composed, produced, or performed using unconventional, commonplace items or other elements of random chance.

**Author's Note:**

> Why, yes, the movie Henry's talking about is, in fact, Zombieland, which remains the only zombie movie I've ever actually seen.
> 
> In case you're fuzzy on the minor characters, Vickie Burns is the oft-mentioned, never-seen girlfriend of Gary's from season one who apparently vanished into thin air by season two, so I figured she got her head on straight and got the hell out of there??? You go, Vickie. Four for you, Vickie.
> 
> (And I could have sworn Charlotte's last name was Briggs? But AO3 says Reigns, soooo.)
> 
> I have a [tumblr](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/), if you're into that kind of thing.


End file.
